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Why WordPress.org Should Write an Honest Bluehost Review

The short version of this article is that we haven’t had great luck with Bluehost, and we’d like WordPress.org to be more transparent with their endorsement. Essentially, our Bluehost review is technically a review of WordPress.org’s Bluehost review. For better hosting alternatives look at our WordPress hosting comparison article.

WordPress Hosting is a tricky business and finding an impartial Bluehost review is even more difficult. I’ve never been employed at a web host but I do have a lot of background working with systems that need to be online and available all the time. It’s hard enough when you have complete control over your environment, so throwing millions of sites into the mix that take full advantages of all the resources you have to offer can be a real strain, and can make being the best WordPress hosting company an extremely lofty goal. I understand all of that completely. Hosting ain’t no kids game.

I’ve talked about WordPress hosting reviews at length before, and I want to bring that same topic up again, but this time in a very specific context. After years of WordPress.org endorsing Bluehost, I believe it’s time they stop.

This is actually tough for me to write because I know people personally who work at Bluehost and this no fault of theirs. Many great techs and developers have no control over business decisions that have been hurting Bluehost’s reputation. They do their best to provide a great service, but they’re playing against a stacked deck and their service, performance, and uptime have tanked over the last year.

Things have gotten so bad that WPMU just awarded Bluehost with a wooden spoon for being the bottom feeder in an unbiased review of 5 different web hosts. Now I don’t know about you, but winning a wooden spoon doesn’t sound like a very awesome prize for a company that should be leading in a high tech industry. Maybe a Blendtec would be a better modern-day kitchen-inspired prize? I digress.

Unfortunately our experience with Bluehost over the past 6-9 months has been similar to what was represented in the WPMU post. Slower servers, poor technical support, and more frequent outages have become the norm, and not the exception.

A Missed Opportunity for a More Honest Bluehost Review from WordPress.org:

We’ve dealt with more hosts than you can imagine; in our opinion, the hosts below represent some of the best and brightest of the hosting world. If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back—so you can have a great host and support WordPress.org at the same time.

Money Talks

So what’s WordPress.org’s motivation to continue to endorse Bluehost without at least providing users with a frank review of their services? Is it the good affiliate program that helps support the operation of the site and the community? Is it Bluehost’s frequent high-level sponsorship of WordCamps? Or is it simply a gentleman’s handshake that continues to stand?

It’s probably a combination of all three. I honestly have no problem with WordPress listing a host on the .org site with an affiliate link. It takes money to power an open source community like this one. Probably way more than I even know. The bigger issue to me is that they outright say that Bluehost is the “best and brightest of the hosting world” and unfortunately that’s no longer the case. I hope Bluehost does get things figured out, but until then, the WordPress foundation should probably ease off on the leg humping.

I’d honestly much rather see companies pay for space on the .org site than have new users getting bad recommendations. At least if .org was selling the space for $25,000 a month, everyone would know that was the situation and would be on their own for research. It would be transparent and people would know that “Daddy D’s Wacky WordPress Hosting” just had deep pockets, didn’t necessarily provide the best service.

What do YOU think? Should WordPress.org stop endorsing Bluehost? Should they at least provide an honest Bluehost review or some kind of real-life customer feedback? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The hosting they recommend is literally the worst you could use if you are any level of business in the EU. So many great hosts out there at every price point the ones they show are so wrong. The page looks seriously neglected too. I assume they get paid per signup or some affiliate metric that encourages signups, so they dont really care about speed, PHP versions. Host Gator still run 5.6 PHP in mid 2019, kinda mad.

I just moved to Bluehost from “.wordpress.com” and now I’m super pissed. It took me a long time to figure out how to migrate my site because it was my first time, and then when I have it all figured out, it turns out that Bluehost is one of the worst hosts out there.

After having it on Bluehost for one day, I’m already having problems such with my site taking 10-20 seconds to load, and – this just happened – my site is no longer loading at all.

Thank you for saying the emperor has no clothes. Bluehost used to be a great company. Then they were bought by Endurance who drove it into the ground. I finally grew so disgusted with their useless tech support (after waiting up to 45 minutes to even get a tech), that I left them for Siteground and have never looked back. Now, an affiliate marketer recommending BlueHost is my acid test of whether they’re full of BS or not. WordPress will get bit if they keep messing with that dog.

Go to bluehost if you want to have your website with a company that treats their employees like garbage. I was suffering from mental health issues due to the upper management being verbally abusive and the HR manager Ryan Carkhuff refused to fill out the paper work to help me get medical. Kept saying “are you resigning then?” over and over and over. https://youtu.be/dxDPbYJlwO0 this is the audio of them. Since then over half of the overnight crew has quit. there are only 4 people left. They would rather treat their employees like shit then prevent their customers from having a 3 hour wait time. They kept beating around the bush because they wanted me to resign so they didnt have to fire me so i couldnt collect unemployment or disability. Seriously a scummy company full of horrible people that dont care about the customer.

I used Bluehost for about a year and a half. In that time, they quintupled my monthly fee, degraded my service, slowed my load times to a crawl, held my code hostage, allowed malware to be installed in my WP theme files (or put it there themselves, it wouldn’t surprise me) and had me dealing with support techs who either didn’t know what was and wasn’t company policy, or lied because they didn’t know what to do, or both — and this is with me spelling out the problem and often just trying to get information from them so I could handle the fix myself.

Very happy to leave when my site went from “perfectly fine” to “throttled to death” overnight despite no changes being made, and their only response was “you could always upgrade your hosting.”

Bluehost was absolutely the worst experience i’ve had in 3 years of online entrepreneurship. I originally had my website hosted at GoDaddy and decided to switch for a couple different reasons. It was the worst mistake I could have made. Technical support and all around services are extremely poor quality. For example, it took literally 2 weeks for Bluehost’s third party partner to migrate my website from GoDaddy to their servers. Bluehost seemed to think it wasn’t their problem, but it was a major problem regardless. I recently switched to WPEngine, and it only took about 2 hours to migrate my website over. That is just the tip of the iceberg. My advice would be to avoid Bluehost at all cost. You’ll hear a lot of people recommending them, but beware because they offer a high affiliate referral fee. I could be wrong in my assumption, but my guess is that the ONLY reason people still refer to Bluehost is because they make significant amounts of money doing so. I know of one influencer who claims to make upwards of $50,000/mo from Bluehost affiliate commissions.

I stopped using Bluehost a long time ago because they simply do not give the message, that’s the truth, when it comes to hosting nowadays I use Hostgator, Hostinger and Digital Ocean and I highly recommend it.

After a failed attempt to cancel my renewal (due to some unknown issue) Bluehost have failed to honour their money back guarantee, stating yet more technical issues. They could neither explain the problem nor give even an estimated time frame for my refund, refusing to narrow it down to days, months or (shockingly) even years!

Their customer support could barely understand what I was saying half the time, and the wait times for live chat were upwards of 10 minutes. When I asked simple questions they would ignore my question and simply rattle a scripted nonsense that had nothing to do with my query! If they didn’t like my question they would simply stop responding.

I cancelled my hosting renewal because not only had the price increased 3 fold but their website was impossible to use. I had to ask a friend who builds websites for a living to help install wordpress as their one-click install didn’t work.

I am a writer with an idea for a blog. I called their number yesterday with some questions. FYI, I am literate in most tech subjects but am not even close to being an expert on any of them. But I am not afraid to ask even stupid questions. All I ask for is some literate answers. Enough said. I prefaced by call with the words “I am new at this and don’t even know what questions to ask.” I then made two rather broad statements to clarify certain points. The result? Two one word answers; “Yes.” That told all I needed to know and I thanked the man for helping me and hung up. Twenty four hours later, I am scouring the web for better responses.

I host many sites with Bluehost and now I am going to move them all. They put one of my domains in varnish cache which means that I cannot make changes and if I do they may take up to 4 hours to show. They did this because last December the domain used too many resources on Plus Hosting. They did not inform me of this, they just did it and I only discovered it when i tried to set up a test site on the domain and went crazy for 2 days because I couldn’t see my changes. Then I thought it was a server issue so I called and found out about the varnish cache, which, I was informed can never be taken off. The only way would be to cancel the domain and begin anew or upgrade to Cloud Hosting at an increased cost.

I have been an affiliate and have introduced many new clients to Bluehost. But no more. The fact that they didn’t find it necessary to inform a customer of a major change infuriates me. Goodbye Bluehost.

YES! Same thing happened to me. I spent an hour on chat with tech support because of caching issues only to be told that there’s a ‘varnish cache’ that builds up when site traffic / server load is high. They cleared it and obliterated my site…only I already hung up with chat to find this out. I had to get back on another chat with another technician to tell me the previous tech “did not replaced the core file of your website”. I’ve spent about a total of 7 hours this week on chat with them due to various issues. I’m so fed up with this POS service. I’ve spent hours and hours building this site and really can’t move it right at this time. I need to move on with other projects. Now I’m stuck with waiting sometimes hours for my site content to refresh. I can’t get straight answers, even asking directed questions. When I ask for my issue to be escalated, then and only then, do I get some explanation as to what’s going on and even then, the answer is not comforting. I’m told to upgrade my service. Yeah, I won’t be sending you crooks any more of my money. I’ll have to deal with this until I can start this project all over again. I should have gone with GoDaddy. Why couldn’t I have seen this article before I made the decision to go with BlueHost? All the research I did (until now, this article was just after I made my decision) raved about how wonderful BlueHost is. Definitely some people are getting paid for spreading biased information.

Hi, I have the shared hosting from September 2016, until now, all work as expected, no problems at all, no slowdown and good communication with support. I migrate from GoDaddy, where i had a lots of technical issues and a very bad communications with they support.

All in my webpage are retail purchased, themes, plugins and so on, and all work perfect.

This review, maybe are based on a personal bad experience and looks like a tons of other bad reviews from Mocha Host, a really very bad hosting system.

WordPress.org are a big monster, and a big monster don’t talk about love with little hosting services.

Recently files on THEIR backend servers became corrupted for “unknown” reasons, even though they claim they are secure.

This caused a lot of distress, as we were not able to log onto cpanel at all.

Is Bluehost safe ? NO

How is their customer service and support? They need to learn to read, you will not get much support. I ended up migrating.
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Clifford Lim
The password file is corrupted on your server?
3:39:34 PM
Clifford Lim
How did the file get corrupted in the first place?
3:41:24 PM
Vishal P
Unfortunately it happens on rare occasion, we don’t have a reason.
3:41:42 PM
Vishal P
If you have not reset the password from long time such issues happens
3:41:52 PM
Vishal P
In that case you have to reset the passwword
3:42:01 PM
Vishal P
*password
3:42:10 PM
Vishal P
For security reasons.
3:42:27 PM
Clifford Lim
Vishal, be careful. Are you trying to tell me not resetting password caused it to become corrupt?
3:44:09 PM
Vishal P
it might be one of the reason, but we can not assure that.
3:44:33 PM
Vishal P
it is always recommended to change the password on regular intervals
3:45:04 PM
Clifford Lim
Vishal. This answer is going up to one of the hosting reviews forums and social media.
3:46:04 PM
Clifford Lim
Is it ok to recommend me to reset password, it is not ok to imply that a file on your backend server is corrupted because I did not update my passwords.
3:46:06 PM
Vishal P
I am giving the actual information from one of our technicians.

Couldn’t agree more. Just signed up to a new Bluehost account. Wish I had read this first. Had trouble with the one click installer. Chatted with support only to redirect me to an article to manually install WordPress. Eventually got site running, only to come up against constant outages and slowness. The worst host I’ve ever used. I can’t believe WordPress.org endorse them.

I have never used Bluehost due to the large number of complaints I have read in numerous articles on the internet, currently I am using Hostinger with dedicated server and to date I have never had problems with server crashing, I highly recommend it.

Bluehost is down for more than 10 hrs now! I’m getting mad with all EIG hostings. Moving my clients out of Bluehost one by one now. There service has gotten bad. Outsourcing support to India is not acceptable and does not solve client problems. I’m moving out and here are the reasons why: . This article describes pretty much what’s going on and why it is not wise to stay with EIG hosting providers.

I upgraded from a Shared Server to the WordPress Standard VPS. They told me it would take 2 to 4 hours, and that my old site would be up and online while the migration happened. 36 hours have gone and my websites (and my client’s websites) are down, showing an ugly page for everyone to see. My emails are obviously not working either. Support says that the migration “has stuck” and it could “eventually go through”, and it will take up to “72 hours” to be fixed. I’m not even sure my files and databases are safe. I asked for details but in the chat support or in [email protected] or [email protected] don’t have access to the error messages or to the migration console. They just say that “developers are aware of that and will fixit asap” and that they have escalated the issue but I have to wait a full weekend (I scheduled the migration by Friday night) because the department that takes care of that isn’t available until Monday. My image with my clients is devastated now. If you deal with BlueHost you’ve been warned. I will ask for a compensation but I doubt I follow with them the next year, and I will go elsewhere to spend 40$/month for the next years. Very eroding experience. Useless support. Lies in Sales department. Lies in confirmation emails telling the old site will be up meanwhile the transfer occurs. Websites and emails down, and confused clients that I can’t explain what happened to.

On three separate occasions I called Bluehost regarding my site consistently going up and down. Each time the rep did a quick check and told me my site was up and running and there were no problems. Apparently they don’t understand what “up and down” means. This is only one example of the many problems I’ve experienced.

My service with them ends in January and it can’t be soon enough. I’ll likely be heading over to SiteGround or iPage. I’ve done quite a bit of research and these two consistently come out the best.

WPMU Dev should be careful who they are giving wooden spoons to. This is the same company that cancelled my account, has for 2 weeks continued to send me emails, and just today after asking me to apologize to them (to get the honor of paying them $50/mo after they treated me so poorly) are now threatening that they are calling a lawyer for harassment. I’ve not spoken to them unless spoken to since the very beginning of all of this.

But I’ve used Bluehost as well, and while the service wasn’t stellar it wasn’t the worst I’ve ever used. GoDaddy still gets that title for their terrible support team.

They are horrible. My website has been down for more than 36 hours now. I am not even joking. This never had happened to me before . Their technical support is absolutely useless, they are unable to solve the issue, and somehow they still blame on me, my plugins and my website, even though the website stopped working with no prior warning due to a 500 error. Worst service ever. AVOID.

I’ve been with them 3 years… they started off okay but have seriously tanked. They moved me to the cloud and lost my databases in the process. The service is slower (while they promised faster) and many outages… There support is crap as well, and no-one can help or follow case. AVOID!!!!!!!!

Do yourself a huge favor and don’t sign up for this year-long hosting nightmare. Their support team is completely unhelpful and rude. I can’t stand calling in for assistance because they are usually very mean people. Unfortunately, I still have 9 months to go! I was totally duped.

Probably the WORST hosting company there is, if not the worst company ever. There sales people outright lied to me to get me to upgrade to a faster server. I explained I had a launch and needed the site to be working. He told me no problem it would take 1 – 2 hours for the migration. As I spoke to different customer service reps 1 – 2 hours turned into 4 – 8, then 8 -12. Here I am on launch day no site and 8 – 12 has turned into up to 72 hours, and what does customer service have to say? Sorry there is nothing we can do about it, it will take as long as it takes. Needless to say I will be switching to another hosting provider ASAP. IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING BLUEHOST AS AN OPTION I HIGHLY SUGGEST YOU STEER CLEAR OF THEM AND ANYTHING THAT EVEN LOOKS LIKE THEM.

I noticed a strange thing with bluehost. A few days back i was checking my domain and Whoa! It now loads some movie site. 😮

The support was unable to help and they said that i have done it. I tried to tell otherwise but they would just not listen. I have the domain in my account and it has a blank index.html in it.

Weird.

I have lost all faith on Bluehost it seems now. Also I have their cloud hosting plan – yet they show it as shared hosting on the top right of the cPanel. I asked the support guy why it shows shared and he said its cloud only but it shows shared like that 😮

I have more than 5 sites hosting with Bluehost (Cloud hosting plan). I cannot believe it almost down once per week on average. And not too long ago, one of my site is down. When I access via ftp, guess what. All the content are gone, only left one empty wp-content folder. It happens when I contacted the technical support via live chat regards the website down issue. The technical support still manage to restore the data. But I found out the recent posts all gone. I asked them to restore the latest backup, they claimed that they did but the posts still missing. They just told me to have to manually repost what I need. However I found out the missing posts were in the thrash. I got no idea why suddenly everything is disappear without reason. Bluehost never answer my question why it is down

Ah yes, every time I have an issue, I ask them, please give me a tip… WE CANNOT HELP YOU WITH THAT… please how can I install memcache and enable php-fpm… we cannot help you with that… well go to hell, Bluehost

After 10 years, I got my yearly renewal with Blue Host 2 months ago. I found in my in email by-pass, a email from Blue host saying my website has been shutdown due to Malware. I haven’t changed a thing in 6 months. The only people who should be able to change add or remove my files are myself and them, I don’t believe no one else can. All others should be only able to download not upload. I called, and it sounded like a we need money thing to fix a problem that they created, or a disgruntled ex-employee. My Domain name is up in a few days, and I thought about calling them again and cussing them out this time, but that’s not the way I do things. When you lose your trust we me, that’s it. I’ll be looking for a new host when I get off of here and hope they don’t come up with this b.s. in the future also. They were like saying it’s my job to keep this stuff off my data space. If it was mine, nothing would get put on it, unless I sent it. I see I am not the only one, how strange. I knew money was going to come up, so I cut them off before she even got to that. Once she said techs, I knew the drill. Bye Blue Host. Just like Vonage you people never learn.

All the companies owned by EIG IS same. I am with Arvixe and my site has been down for the past 3days. No one is attending to mail, nor responding to tickets. No one cares . My frustration in the past 3 days have been beyond words. Thank God I read this because I was about jumping to Bluehost, it would have been from frying pan to fire. Am just frustrated and transferring account isn’t an easy thing to do. Where are the good hosts because I am just tired and frustrated.

I have to agree – unfortunately Blue Host has tanked all around – from site speeds to their customer service team’s “template” answers to questions. I am a long time customer with a number of sites hosted with them. It will be a pain, but I feel I have no choice but to change hosting services as they expire.

100% agree with the accounts I see here. I was a very happy Bluehost customer for over 10 years. Funny, the focus shifted from customer support to upsells at about the same time I started getting “malware” infections every three months that could only be solved by paying them $200.

I am not a newbie. I set up a cron job to monitor my account hourly for changes. The cron job mysteriously turned itself off a few hours before yet another mysterious reinfection and account shutdown. All wordpress components are up-to-date and all security vulnerablities have been addressed and they are no help whatsoever, they just keep doing this and trying to upsell me rather than provide support.

Bluehost’s forum was incredibly inert – just a few entries a day. I can’t believe any host with millions of sites would have so few users, I’ve just nitced they’ve discontinued the ticket system on technical enquiries! [I noticed 2 Aug 2016].

My site is HTML only so I never get the sorts of hassles which may apply to WordPress sites, php users, and so on. I have a lot of sympathy with Bluehost, who must get a lot of beginner programmers making simple mistakes, some of them risky or very timewasting. On the other hand, Bluehost’s information is terrible – on redirecting sites for example the stuff is unreadable.

I’ve never had any really serious issues, such as sites vanishing or being offline forever. But I decided to try their cloud system [NOT cloudflare, which I think makes copyright demands and needs one-only www treatment]. Their cloud in my case is supposed to have four locations – London, Hong Kong, San Jose, Houston – but I’m not even sure it does! The dashboard display doesn’t show the CPU use or RAM use as it should do.
And I have a really odd bug – the ‘Last Visitors’ record has lots of pairs of repeated downloads – same IP, same date and time, same file name – one after another. It almost looks like a policy to fake hits, so that their cloud looks good.

My experience with their support [my site, big-lies.org, has been online about 4 1/2 years] is probably similar to others here: it was good with a few weak experiences, and it is now bad, with a few good experiences. But of course I have no way of knowing whether other hosts are about the same, as they may well be. Maybe we need a union of website owners!

The worst support I have ever had from a hosting company. EVER!!!! My sites have been unavailable for any changes for the past 3 days. When I contact support using chat I get Indian support which I would be fine with IF THEY ACTUALLY DID ANYTHING. Today after 4 different support conversations where I was told..your server is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service attack, we are doing everything we can to take care of the problem (3 days???), then, no, the server itself is having a problem, then, no we don’t keep a copy of our support chats or any support calls, and then when I asked if someone would at least email me an update or something and was told yes, then 4 hours later still no change, I finally called to speak with a manager, to be told, your sever is experiencing a DDOS attack and until we isolate the account that is being attacked we can’t do anything. Um, just how many accounts are on my server. And the solution is to upgrade my account…of course.

I’ve been with Bluehost for more than a decade. They used to be truly great. Since the 2011 purchase by EIG they’ve gone steadily downhill in every way. I’m desperate to find a decent webhost that has good real-time phone support, and isn’t focused on upselling and dumbing-down. Suggestions, please!?

Thank you for your transparency about BlueHost. I linked to your post in a recent video. What people need to know is that they were bought out by EIG in 2011 (along with many other popular hosting companies) and since that time they have gone downhill. Hostgator is also owned by them.

The affiliate program is what is helping these companies grow so fast and they can’t keep up with customer support. EIG is liquidating all these companies and outsourcing employees overseas.

I don’t think I would have even bothered to be a grouchy ex Bluehost client except for my recent experience with them when they suspended my account due to malware. The unhelpful person at the help desk told me that I had only the option to remove it myself or to have my website NUKED.The help desk assistant was so emphatic that I pay money to solve the issue that I began to suspect that this was a total hoax and that Bluehost itself had been hacked!
So I googled that and came across many more stories like mine. My solution was to pay a fellow in India called Harwinder Kumar (via the upwork site) to remove the malware and he did it in two hours for $90.
It was pretty silly of Bluehost to do this to me two months before renewal because today I transferred to inMotion.

So what I did was contact bluehost online to talk to some person who really only wanted me to pay USD$249 to remove the malware and then sign up to an annual fee of USD$500 to have sitelock on my site. (Bluehost celebrated their union with sitelock by getting the guests to buy the wedding present. The online person made me feel that I had no choice but to do so and the only option they offered me was to NUKE my SITE and loose everything. They were very pushy about getting money and not at all interested in solving the problem. I refused to do anything other than sulk and research for a little bit. I am a kiwi and we DIY is in our DNA right but I know below zero about techy stuff even though Bluehost tells you that you can remove the malware yourself… so then delegate. I found a guy on the upwork site called Harwinder Kumar who fixed it in two hours and charged me NZD$90.00. Today I changed from Bluehost to inmotion. Such rotten business practises should never be rewarded!

I am devastated. I was encouraged to sign up with Bluehost by a blogger that I follow. My site has been down for a year and I have a 2 more yrs to go, before it expires. I am out over 2 grand and cant get anything refunded. This site was suppose to help bring in my revenue, it has only cost me. I don’t know where to turn, I have a site that doesn’t work.

After I contacted the better BBB on them they (the design department who I was told had to fix the problem) wont even answer my
emails.

Bluehost is a rip off. They try to entice new customers by having low sign up prices. Service is crappy, and then upon renewal they jack up the rates threefold with the same crappy service.

I am so very glad my hosting is set to renew expire next week; even after bringing all of these points to their attention they, quite frankly, do not care. I have talked to multiple customer service agents AND emailed for feedback, and there is no apology or budging whatsoever. Makes it very easy for them to lose a longstanding customer.

I will be switching over to SiteGround and am looking forward to better service.

I have four sites on Bluehost. I have been reworking 2 of the sites this past 4 weeks so have been on them a bunch along with my developers. My websites have gone down over 20 times (that I know of) for us, just in 4 weeks!

I am SO happy to find this article because as I was calling yet again about my websites being down, and as I was waiting for a level 2 tech to answer, (because the guy who answered the phone didn’t seem to care one bit), I found this article with all these comments and decided to hang up. That is the LAST time I am calling Bluehost. I am switching my hosting this week.

If you are not signed up with Bluehost….DON’T….They really don’t care about you and you may find your site going out all the time like mine is.

Bluest used to be a good company years ago, but they really are a crappy company now for anyone who has a business or needs to not have outages all the time.

Which would you recommend, then? I was about to sign up, until I read this article and some of the comments. I would appreciate if there was a suggestion of a good hosting site. Mine is for blogging, barely anything of major importance, but, still… would like to set foot in the right direction and this one’s kind of not unimpressive, so far.

Maybe there was a time when Bluehost was at the top of their game but that time has definitely passed. I have had numerous sites negatively affected in recent months and Bluehost never takes any responsibility for anything. As many people noted, customer service could care less that you’ve just maybe lost a huge investment of time and money, and can be quite condescending in their reply. Their answer is to blame everyone else (and I mean EVERYone WordPress) and they basically leave you to fend for yourself. If you are considering this hosting company, think again.

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY. FOR ALL THE MONEY YOU SAVE, YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE IN PROBLEMS.

I am out of there after a service tech told me that my client’s problem wasn’t important enough to escalate to management when I asked for a solution and they take responsibility.

I am a developer. I have been designing websites since 1999. I have been developing sites using WordPress since 2006.

I have client sites on Godaddy, Lunarpages, Justhost, and recently Bluehost.

My clients site was compromised to full root access FIVE times. Each time after a completely new install, new database, and updated plugins. I also had cpanel wiped to a new install, an changed all passwords.

He is on shared hosting.

I have four times called them. They never take any credit and try to sell me extra monitoring for more money (around $500). I have taken every recommendation that they have suggested and implemented them. They love to refer the WP link, https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked which I am sure I read soon after it was published an ion ago.

None of my sites on other shared hosting accounts are having problems.

This last time, Joshua of Bluehost, told me that my case wasn’t important enough to escalate.

They are very rude and act very blameless. Our case was so uncommon, that out of 17 years I have never had this problem. I think it was important enough to escalate.

This is the worst server experience and company that I have ever dealt with.

Here is the full transcript:

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Chat ID: 6847447. We have had multiple attacks that resulted in a full site compromise to full root access (symlinks to root). We believe that our shared account contains some sort of darkleech virus because of the following: 1.) We have reloaded a clean, up-to-date WordPress install and new database 5 times in the course of the past few months. 2.) We had Bluehost wipe our cpanel 1 time. 3.) We have ran virus scans on our clean versions with no warnings before uploading. We ran the same virus scans on the download of infected site and found viruses. 4.) We installed WireFence as directed by your techs and put the warnings on maximum security and notifications settings and received no warnings or notifications this last time (the 5th time). The virus populate all the way to root access without detection. NOTE: We run this same plugin on other sites and have warnings of changes to web and logins. We know that this plugin works, however it failed on this server. This has cost my client a lot of time, effort, money and now a warning from your hosting company that we are in violation for phishing. We need a remedy. We ask that you move our site to a secure, monitored service at your cost for a one year period OR – A refund of our hosting service fees. I develop websites and how five active sites up and running on other servers and have not had this problem. I am using the same template framework on each (underscore theme). Please let me know if there is a solution that we can work out. I am open to hearing solutions, but my client will not agree to putting more money towards your company. We believe Bluehost is at fault. I will be here waiting for an answer to pass on to XXXXXX, the owner of the site.
10:00:17amJoshua

Hi! Thank you for contacting terms of service. My name is Josh! How are you today?

Can you please provide the last four characters of the main account password?

10:00:44amKim

I can provide the call in support number. Can I use this?

10:05:49amKim

Can we use the security code that we set up for calling in? Or do I have to provide the last 4 characters?

10:06:35amJoshua

You can use the 6+ digit PIN or the last 4 of your password.

10:07:03amKim

XXXXXXX

10:07:32amJoshua

Thanks

10:08:06amKim

You are welcome Joshua. How are you today?

10:08:18amKim

I know we can find a solution.

10:08:26amKim

I will give you time to read my case, okay? I did not include that we also

10:09:02amKim

changed all passwords, including ftp, database, and email accounts twice.
I have added special passwords for key folders as well after reinstalliing clean sites.

10:11:38amJoshua

So our servers are patched against Darkleech, they were either before it was a problem or within a few days of the issue(it’s been sometime since that one so I don’t remember for sure), we take server security very seriously. So the server will not be the cause of why your the sites are getting hacked.

Passwords are important to change, but actually not the main cause for WordPress sites getting hacked. It’s commonly from a vulnerable component in your site. So if you’ve secured your passwords I suggest you check the components you’re using.

10:12:29amKim

All of my plugins are up to date (or were at the time) and are common plugins.

10:12:49amKim

I am not saying this is a darkleech, I am saying that it is a psuedo.

10:13:51amKim

I believe that it is possible for this type of virus to get into your servers from articles I have reviewed by sucuri.net

10:15:45amKim

Reports of latest visitors have shown that they are looking for plugins with vulnerabilities that we do not have on the site

10:16:39amKim

And it is my understanding, from the other techs that I have talked to, that service accounts like the one my client has, are not monitored at deep levels. This I have been told is an additional price.

10:17:06amKim

So I hope we can agree that Bluehost might have some part in this.

10:17:53amKim

This is so uncommon. I have been doing this since 1999. I have only seen this once, and that is 3 years ago when the first virus of this type appeared.

10:18:38amKim

I have done 5 full wipes of this site. 2 times, full server account wipes

10:21:48amJoshua

If it were psuedo dark leech, that’s actually a site vulnerability.

Our servers are completely secure, you’ll want to further examine your site components, having your plugins and theme up-to-date is important, but just as important is ensuring they are still supported and patched by the developer.

What other techs maybe referring to is SiteLock, which is a monitoring service that monitors your account files. The server files however are constantly monitored by many individuals. Your account files are your responsibility as these are your site files.

The server is 100% secure, you’ll need to check your components if your passwords and computers you access the server from are secure.

10:23:02amKim

We have taken all of your suggestions in the past.

10:23:38amKim

We have invested a lot of money with this problem.

10:24:35amKim

My other sites are not having any problems, and on one, I have similar activity of unauthorized users trying to gain access to the site. Wordfence has been blocking them.

10:25:15amKim

We have not found vulnerabilities.

10:25:52amKim

There may be some, but all scans have indicated that there are no problems on our clean site before and after we upload.

10:26:13amKim

How are we going to fix this?

10:26:48amKim

I am giving your company an opportunity here. I have been told 4 times it is in no way your fault. We now say it is.

10:27:56amKim

A refund for our hosting account is a solution.

10:28:39amKim

Monitoring our account for a year is another solution. Your company pays as a gratis for our problem.

10:31:28amJoshua

Our servers are secure, they are patched against all vulnerabilities, so the only way to hack your sites is either through a password or the sites themselves.

We wish to retain your business, but we cannot fix this issue as it’s with your account itself.

SiteLock is a service you’re welcome to purchase as well. They are our partner, but still a 3rd party, so we are not able to provide this service free.

10:32:53amKim

If you choose not to fix this, I will post our conversation on the internet. Maybe some other people are having this same problem and can show up to help your company identify a problem you might be having.

10:33:15amKim

And you will lose our business.

10:34:40amKim

Maybe nobody else is having this problem.

10:35:10amKim

But it will open the conversation.

10:36:02amKim

Our only intention is to fix this problem.

10:37:50amJoshua

Securing your sites against malware isn’t something we can help with. The types of sites available for use vary greatly for Linux servers. So securing your sites is something you’ll have to investigate. The only other thing I can suggest if you haven’t already viewed it is, https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked

Beyond that I’ll reiterate our servers are secure and if your sites are continuing to get hacked, it will be a site issue or password issue.

10:38:30amKim

I have read that article.

10:39:38amKim

I am not a newbie web designer. I would like to have your manager on this conversation.

10:39:42amKim

Please.

10:40:46amKim

I will reiterate that I have been doing this since 1999 and that I have been using WordPress since 2006.

10:41:33amJoshua

The fact you know about darkleech and psuedo darkleech tells me your not a newbie, but that doesn’t change the fact the servers are secure and the issue will be with your account.

10:43:08amKim

“In the end, an attacker will take whatever you give them. On most shared servers(Even servers on some of the more popular hosting services), attackers can create a symlink like we showed above to escalate access.” Securi.net

10:44:56amKim

My client has no more than 1 or 2 hundred dollars invested in your company. I am sure that your company will not suffer to return a refund, even if it has deducted use so far.

10:45:44amJoshua

This is not an for issue for us, it’s not possible for you access anything on the server level, so there’s nothing to give. Not even I can access files on the server level.

10:46:13amKim

Talk to your manager please.

10:46:50amKim

It is not a wrong right issue.

10:46:58amKim

It is a reputation issue.

10:48:19amJoshua

This will not be good use of your time, I can see if one is available, but he will tell you the same thing I’ve said exactly. There’s no server vulnerabilities and you’ll want to examine your files/passwords.

10:48:42amKim

No, this is not good service by you.

10:48:53amKim

I work for my client. It is a very good use of my time.

10:49:56amJoshua

I’m happy to escalate when I believe a manager can help, this isn’t something he can help with.

I have had problem after problem with Bluehost. They are down far too often to be considered an enterprise solution. Their support is abysmally slow, not to mention uninterested and condescending. Anyone who actually uses their site and receives any legitimate traffic is flagged constantly for TOS violations. Stay away.

My business website has been down 30x since Jan 1 2016. Every time I call or start a chat the wait is 25+ minutes. The people supporting are condescending, arrogant and generally could care less. Bottom line is they tell me if I don’t like the down time, I should increase my account to a dedicated server from @ $60 a year to $1200+ a year. A classic bait and switch which also means they are more interested in the up sale and because of this have ZERO incentive to fix the problem. NO ONE has every given me an answer as to why the site keeps going down, though it’s obvious they have too many resources on the shared server and are not investing in infrastructure. The support staff is not really support. They are fond of saying “I don’t know” and “I’m not a sys admin.” On chat, one support guy kept giving me weird answers, then apologizing. Turns out he was running multiple chats at the same time and getting confused who he was speaking with. Worthless company and super dishonest.

I wished I had read this review before I started with Bluehost last year (2015). I had my blog on wordpress.com for 5 years and then decided I would go to a self-hosted model and opened an account at Bluehost at the recommendation by wordpress.org and various other bloggers which I didn’t realize at the time why.
After several days of being on chats/phone with Bluehost, I realized what the sales people promised me was totally different from what they were willing to do. Basically my data size was too big to transfer but I found this out only after paying the $99 for their migration service. I finally got them to refund everything but I had wasted a whole week of my time because the sales people were NOT at all knowledgeable.
I have a lot of web development experience just not with wordpress so I believe I asked all the right questions but never got the accurate answer.
Now, a full year later, I find out that they had kept my credit card info and decided to charge me for some renewal Search Engine Jumpstart for a year – $14.99 when I have cancelled everything last year!! I didn’t even think my account was still active?!

PLEASE be extra careful when dealing with Bluehost. Especially when things go wrong!!

I empathize with my fellow frustrated Bluehost subscribers regarding poor customer support. I was having issues with very slow WordPress websites about a month ago and submitted a ticket to Bluehost.

NO CONFIRMATION they received my ticket. And after about THREE WEEKS I finally received an email. By that time, my problem had resolved itself –I’m not sure how, but maybe due to uninstalling an add-on. When I asked why it took so long to respond, the tech support rep said it was due to the “bulk of tickets in the pool.”

Web hosting companies have a responsibility to respond and help their customers in a timely fashion. Bluehost certainly drops the ball on that score. If they are that backlogged they should hire more people. A three-week response time is totally unacceptable. I just had to vent my dissatisfaction and frustration, as many of you here have done.

Maybe some day it will do some good and they will make the changes necessary to excel at customer support, as they once did years ago before the company changed hands and Bluehost was young and eager to please.

I had a very bad experience with Bluehost and would not recommend this company even to my worst enemies. Besides having countless problems with their poor hosting service, I was misled to buy upgrades that would fix one problem then cause another. The uptime got so bad that it reached 50% (according to an independent report). Resorting to their trouble ticket system is a waste of time. I was told by one of their technicians that they have about 7,000 tickets in the queue! More recently, they suspended my account arguing that I was “overusing” their resources (not sure how that’s possible with a 50% uptime). Once I disputed some credit card charges for poor hosting, they tried to blackmail me by holding my domain name hostage. Eventually, they came to their senses and released the domain name for transfer. So glad I no longer have my website hosted by them!

Bluehost is hilariously awful. I just opened a live chat to ask about a DNS error and the guy told me that our domain wasn’t registered with bluehost. I literally had to make a screenshot to prove it to him. 10 minutes later he came back with an even worse suggestion.

I had to call Shopify to fix the issue even though the issue was on Bluehost’s end. That’s right, the tech support for shopify is doing the job of bluehost tech support.

I’ve had bluehost for 5 years now, and I can honestly say, I’m getting fed up with them very quickly.
Everything was fine the first few years, sure the site loading was slow, but I though maybe it’s because they don’t like to host video files to play on the site. But when those video files are 5-10MB… Leaves you wondering what the issue is. Not to mention the notifications from JetPack about my site being down, sometimes multiple times per week. Last night it was down for half an hour.
I recently started using 1and1 (about 4 months ago) for a website I created for the fraternal organization I am in, and have only had one down time for 7 minutes.
There is a hosted video that is ~25MB that loads as fast as my internet connection will allow, ~1.2MB/s. Maybe it’s because 1and1 uses SSD hosting, I’m not sure.
If I get one more notification from Jetpack about my bluehost site being down for over 10 minutes, I will be switching to 1and1.

Oh wow. I’m very shocked to read all those horror stories! I’ve registered with Bluehost six months ago, and I must admit I never had trouble. Yes, it does run slow sometimes but nothing major on my end.

I am a little scared now that if something happens, Bluehost won’t be very helpful.
Hopefully it’s not just a matter of time before a major issue hits me…

Bluehost is awful. After I paid for hosting, I could not get the hosting plan connected to my domain name, nor could I get any help from Bluehost. It was after I took legal action that they finally connected my domain name to my hosting plan. That is their business and it’s what they do all day. You’d think they could have helped out with hosting my site! And to this day they won’t tell me what they did to finally get the hosting working. Of course I had already pointed the hosting plan to the server names they gave me but that was not enough. Why is everything such a secret with these awful hosting companies?

I use Shared pro (MY shared hosting have problem and my 2 principal site have problems , slow and continus 503 server error) i migrate the saturday to VPS; one of my sites work and another 100% offline) now VPS say Full disk Support guy say pay extra space for correct this I pay, so need mouth this! new space, support guy mount this buyed space to /home and my site 100% offline, I try to rever, I try to access to CPanel an need root acces and clear carpet , for continues to CPanel so what is the next trouble?

Saturday I chat with support thinking in Cloud Or VPS hosting, Saturday Support Guy say
Cloud Hosting is a shared service / Monday (Today) another support guy say NO ; cloud not is shared.
employers dont have clear information

Ever since I signed up with Bluehost – just a week ago – I’ve been getting sales calls not just from them, but from every other jerk with a call center. Apparently they gave my number and email address to everyone, without my permission or knowledge. I don’t care how great their service is (or isn’t), this is inexcusable. I’m transferring hosting immediately and will dispute payment to them with my credit card company if necessary. What jerks!

And, I should note: I chose them after looking at user reviews, which were all glowing. Then, after the first call, I typed in the call number and discovered that marketing harassment is common practice with this company.

I’ve used bluehost for years and had all manner of issues. Once my site was down for days and they blamed an external switch, but couldn’t / wouldn’t do anything about it. Downtime and painfully slow access have been issues, but the biggest problem is their awful support. Online chat is slow, dumb and I don’t think has ever solved an issue. Calling their contact numbers has seen me wait for 20, 30 or upto 40mins to be ‘helped’. I once finally got through and the guy told me he couldn’t help me and he hung up. Other times a transfer to a technician didn’t work – and they hung up on me.
Garbage. Glad to finally be away from them.

The hold times are unreasonable. While on hold, the wait times fluctuate. The lack of customer support representatives makes this product acceptable only for customers who will never have a need for any technical or customer support. Canceling the account meant waiting on hold three times – the first time only to be told to call back, the second that I needed to be transferred and the third just to be told that I would receive an email with a link to a webpage that would allow me to request a cancellation. Why not provide customers with decent service and an easy option to leave?

Bluehost came to me highly recommended. At no point could I access my own site. Within an hour I tried to cancel my account and they emailed me a form I had to fill out to cancel but in order to cancel, I had to be able to sign in to my account, which I couldn’t do. I spent more time trying to cancel it than it was up! and I swear they had one guy answering the phone because I called 3 times, each time it told me it was a 2 minute wait–not at all accurate–and then I got the same guy. Unbelievable. Terrible experience.

Bluehost is a real disaster for anyone who wants to host their website, please STAY AWAY!
My business plus website has experienced service interruptions and I was talked into upgrading the service to their new Cloud Business service and scheduled a migration on the same day.

They totally screwed up the migration and my website and email have stopped working for over 2 days and yet still been told to wait.

They do not have any back up plans and they do not know how long it will take to get the migration done. Their customer service simply tells you to wait.

When I trying to move to a different hosting company, they even have my account locked up so I could not even get a backup of my SQL database.

I am talking about a business e-commerce website and sales are generated everyday on the website.

If you are trying to lose your investment and customers, try Bluehost.com and they will surprise you with their know-hows!

I put two web clients with Bluehost due to the WordPress endorsement. I wish I never had. Slow sites, tickets unresponded to, unresolved issues, cut and paste replies, trouble with their own site and services not working! Are you kidding me? What went wrong with them? BH now operates like GoDaddy and Hostgator; terrible. I have other clients with Siteground-phenomenal!

blue host is the WORST. WORST customer service, I keep losing my mail, and when i call to get help they are rude and don’t help at all. One advisor just had me remove a mailbox and while I was trying to re-install there was a problem and he couldn’t help me set it up. I was like, ok – so you had me remove my email and now you can’t help me set up a new one. he’s like ya, call apple, we don’t use apple products. WTF!! so here I sit no mail. No help and rude customer service EVERYTIME I CALL!

I’ve been with Bluehost for over a decade, but they appear to be a disaster now. I remember when I could email the founder and got replies back. Just now, I ran a page load test and it looks like 50 seconds to load my simple wordpress home page. I went to the support area it says there is a 30-minute wait. I have thought about switching to their cloud hosting product; I assumed the problem was that I am on a shared server with a bunch of idiots who are corrupting performance, but now I think the problem is just Bluehost.

Couldn’t agree more with this comment. I’ve been worn Bluehost for 10 years and this is my exact experience. Garbage page loading speed and hopeless customer service, and declining more and more each time I need them. I desperately want to change, but I can’t find a good reliable substitute. Or an unbiased non affiliate site.

Hi Dave! longtime Bluehost customer here too. Just switched to cloud hosting. Seems like my sites just keep slowing down. Was wondering if switching over to another provider fixed the problem for you? My membership site seems to have slowed down even more after switching to cloud… And if it is fine with you if you could tell me who you went with.

All three of my sites hosted by Bluehost have been down all day. Same experience as others regarding the 30 minute displayed wait time actually taking over an hour. There response to my inquiry more than 8 hours ago was that it was a problem on their end that they would have resolved in the next couple hours.

I am moving sites away from Bluehost as fast as I can. Two reasons: Bad Hosting and Bad Customer Service.

Bad Hosting: My sites are monitored by UptimeRobot.com and SiteUptime.com. They send me an email when my sites go down. They go down for periods of 20+ minutes a time several times a day. Bluehost will do nothing about it.

Customer Service: Half an hour wait on phone until they hung up. One hour wait on chat. No response. Sent an email to [email protected]. No response for TWO WEEKS! Opened a trouble ticket- no response until I opened another a week later. No response to second ticket whatsoever. No response to postal mail sent to VP of Customer Service, Ben Lewis. Get the picture?

Bluehost is such a terrible company to do business with. My website is being going down for a week now, a couple of hours daily. You try to contact their support and you get in line that says “wait time: 30 minutes”. But instead you stay in line over 1 hour and minutes counter will not move. I am hiring another website host company.

I absolutely hate bluehost. I have had email problems literally for YEARS. And these guys get SEO people to come in a bury anything negative, so if you want to spare your friends and family, keep writing reviews and spreading the news first hand because Bluehost will never admit that they suck. I am moving all my sites as soon as I get a window of time. In the meanwhile, my emails will NEVER WORK WELL ON MY MAC MAIL CLIENT… as usual for the last five years.

I will never use BlueHost again! I’ve been trying to install wordpress and I keep getting an error saying it can’t build the database. I do have an active database on same account so I tried to install the theme I just purchased from ThemeForest and guess what…It can’t display it. So I tried another theme that I got from there and same thing! Then I get an error stating that the php version is outdated. I then try to call 30min wait! I’m still waiting from a 20 min chat wait. I would like to tell them to stop advertising because they can’t handle the customers and their service is absolutely terrible. I used to use BlueHost all the time because of their fast customer service and everything just worked good! But I’m done…GoDaddy here I come.

Great article! Yes, my WordPress site was automatically updated to a new WordPress version. My site is totally unrecognizable. Some content shows but quite a bit does not show, the company logo is gone, the phone numbers, the e-mail information is bogus. They layout is completely askew. I received an e-mail that an WordPress update had been applied to my site. Message said “Howdy your WordPress site has been updated automatically to 4.3.2. I put in a support call to get this resolved. BlueHost support (terrible at best) said my website is up and I should clear my cache. Never mind that my website content is missing (much of it) and the information is bogus, as far as BlueHost is concerned, all is OK. Wouldn’t recommend BlueHost to anyone. When I first started they were good but service and support has really declined in recent years.

I tried to sign up for bluehost today. They A. listed the fees as monthly but charge yearly only once you’ve put in your credit card, B. then charge an ADDITIONAL $149 only AFTER you sign up and pay the annual fees to transfer over a website. If I buy hosting, I obviously need to transfer over my website. The additional $149 wasn’t listed anywhere in the marketing information for hosting. I then tried online chat, that was a 30 min hold. I did call and get someone right away. She helped me cancel. It was going to take a week to get my money back so she suggested I could expedite but had to talk to another department. That’s another 20 min wait. Still holding…

Yes WordPress and all the bloggers who endorse this horrible company should stop! I can’t even make a new business card because Bluehost has decided my emails are spam (same as someone above reported) even though I have sent only 5 or 6 emails total from the address over a year and a half period. It’s an hour wait for a useless chat. And like someone else above, I got locked out of my account because of the wacky Lost Password link.

They were OK a few years ago when I signed up but now they are a joke! I’m going to learn how to transfer my files to a new host ASAP.

This is so helpful and I appreciate your blog–thank you! I’ve had a host (ha!) of problems with Bluehost for the last 2-3+ years. They were so great years ago…came recommended by my web developer. These days, they’re down so often it seems like it’s to be expected every month or so, and every six months or so they have a HUGE server issue…down for days.
My needs are simple–just a website that I rarely change, but it is my main form of advertising. My email is with them too, though, and that’s where the problems come in…they are down so often. I just was down last week for 5 days. No joke. It is embarrassing to me to have to email my clients from my personal address all the time. The amount of energy I wasted on the whole ordeal makes me angry.

I’m switching to wpengine. It is as much as I pay for the VPS that Bluehost talked me into and I hear it’s really reliable and good. I’ll be using Google Business for my email.

I’ve been with Bluehost for a decade and they USED TO BE terrific. The last 6 months, every time I call in the wait times are insane. I’m talking 40 minute wait times. And they never actually fix the problem. Instead, they sell you some high-priced “specialized” service. This past Thursday, they upsold me another $800 and 2 days later, my website was still down. (I’m writing this on Saturday)

I just called in again and they figured out I wasn’t playing around anymore. Turns out, all I needed to do was uninstall a problematic plug-in that was known for causing the problem I had encountered.

Same story here…they actually told me they had no idea why my WordPress site admin was so slow. Tested without plugins, different theme, still unusably slow. I’d be very curious to know what the problematic plugin you deactivated? Thanks.

Bluehost.com? Horrible! 2 things..
1 – My emails have been listed as spam and are not getting out. They refuse to give me any information or explanation. They are guilty of something and are poorly hiding it. I send out 10 to 12 individual emails a day at most – I don’t spam. I read that the dirty little secret is they (bluehost.com) are getting listed as spammers as an entire host company.
2 – There is just absolutely no accountability – you can go sit and spin as far as they are concerned. They might as well be a utility company.
Run away very fast and never look back!!!!
Try SiteGround.com instead. I asked my new IT guy and he’s had pretty good luck with them over the years.

AMEN! I signed up for BlueHost in 2012 and I am currently relocating all of my sites and client sites to SiteGround. I have had numerous issues with BlueHost over the years, most notably websites mysteriously disappearing (read: all files, database, etc). and sometimes reappearing days later – with no explanation. I’ve heavily invested in offsite backup services for each of my sites due to this issue. Happens once, shame on me (I guess?!) but it happens twice – or more, which it has – shame on you BlueHost. Currently, I’m locked out of my Cpanel because I used the password generator to update my password to a new, totally random password and now that password (you know, the one their generator gave me) doesn’t work. Think that “forget password” link might work? NOPE. Now, to gain access, they’re making me send in a copy of my original back statement for 2012 when I set up the account along with a copy of my ID; after all this, they’ll get to helping me get access “sometime in the coming week.” Gee, thanks again BlueHost.

They are saying they can give a site 100m page views a month for $12.49. From my experience of high traffic WordPress websites, even 21m page views a month was killing powerful servers – and that’s only what we being reported by Google Analytics. The actual bot visits would be 3 times as much.

Yes we had a few plugins, but the bare minimum. And we cached the heck out of the site, and it still struggled some times.

So for them to say 5 WP sites, with 20m page visits a month each (not even talking about the 100s of millions of server hits from downloading of resources), and only running on 2GB of RAM… should be illegal surely?

I’m just getting into WordPress site building and am researching the .org v .com setup structure. Just got off chat with a Bluehost rep that was actually super helpful and very honest when I asked baited questions. For example, regarding the pricing structure, I had asked about any unlisted discounts and he told me about the multi-year pricing model. My response, “so the upfront list is kind of click-bait for selecting the longest plan for the biggest discount?” Without delay, he said, “Right.” Then we talked about how to get that lower price point for a lower commitment period, where he said renewals have some flexibility on rates. My response, “I sign up, give it a few days, cancel my account during the first 30 days, then get some kind of ‘no stay with us’ email or just have this conversation again.” Bluehost Agent: “oh haha. yeah something along those lines.” I got his shift so that I can try and get him online again if I decide to give this a shot because he was “not sure what rate that specific agent would give…it’s easier that way.”

I give the agent credit for his honesty – they aren’t his policy decisions after all – but knowing I can get better pricing by jumping through hoops and now seeing this has me wondering. Thanks for the additional research and links!

Interesting to read! Signed up with Bluehost a while ago due to a high recommendation from a friend. Now, very disappointed with Bluehost for how they handled my request to reverse an illegit charge.
They charged me a few months ago for Sitelock service for a domain that was not a part of my account. It had been de-linked from my account a full year previously. It was ridiculous getting stonewalled by their agents (through email and phone) spouting the company line about how they can’t reverse the charge because I was outside some 30-day refund period policy.
Took me 50 minutes on the phone to get to a resolution point.

I’m currently shopping for a new host for my blog. I came across this post after reading an endorsement for Bluehost on MichaelHyatt.com. After reading your post, I wonder if Mr. Hyatt is getting paid for his endorsement.

Hello Ryan – great post and I thoroughly agree. I have had nothing but problems since I signed up for a hosting account with bluehost – so much so that I cannot access my own wordpress site! Their online text chat is not helpful and with no email contact provided, it is not possible to get help. I am trying to work out what to do with the domain register company but I know the problem is with bluehost. I don’t know enough to fix the problem myself but do know enough to know that I am not impressed! What sort of company doesn’t provide an email address? I can’t even cancel the account.

Wow.. i didn’t realize bluehost could be this bad for bloggers. Tell you the truth I would buy hosting service at bluehost for the reason that they being endorsed by wordpress. I have hosted on blogger for several years and had been trying to use selfhosted wordpress on local hosting provider.

I want to leverage my blogging experience and I get info and experiencing bad maintainance from my local host provider. So I look up to wordpress and they say bluehost is one of their recomendation. I also find internet marketers that I learnt from also recommend blue host. thats why i would choose this hosting service, but all your trouble with the provider gives me a second thoughts. Make me reaally careful to choose hosting provider.

I will refer to your post about bluehost. thanks for sharing your experience.

After reading some of the comments, I guess I should consider myself lucky, but I sure do not feel that way. The bottom line is that I had thought that I could build a simple on-line business using Bluehost, but that is certainly not the case. I’ve suspended all web building and marketing until I can find a more reliable host, and in the meantime am only doing basic site maintenance. That is, I’m doing site maintenance during those rare times that I can access my editor – I’ve made the development of my site my full-time gig, but today was pretty much a lost day as my editor was only able to connect to the server for a couple of hours, and most of that time the server was painfully slow. I would not recommend Bluehost to even the casual blogger, but if you want to commit any real time to your site, then run away from Bluehost as fast as you can.

The email never works properly. It shows ERROR each time I want to send an email, it kicks me out of the system a few times a day, in the middle of typing i get logged out, we do not receive some emails due “filtering”, same with sending. Bluehost says 24hr support but you can not reach them or it takes 40 min. I did ask for help hundred times and technical support does not hep! Ridiculous!
We can not run the business this way! very unprofessional!

I don’t like and don’t recommend Bluehost at all. I’ve got 32 downtimes in one day and for a month I’ve had a lot. I signed up to Uptime Robot to monitor my websites, so I get notifications about downtimes. It was terrible. I thought it was a joke, but when I checked my website, it really was unavailable. After a month I decided to run away from Bluehost. Very regret that I didn’t do that earlier. It’s cheap and not reliable hosting. If you care about your visitors and website, don’t do my mistake, choose another host. Also customer support didn’t help me and seems very low quality at understanding and resolving issues. Hope it will be helpful to somebody.

I chose Bluehost about 7 years ago (2008) to host my blog, which had been hopping from host to host with no real satisfaction.

At the time, Bluehost had great reviews as far as reliability and price point. Plus, they offered full compatibility with WordPress, which is the platform I blogged on. So I chose them and was able to hit the ground running.

Over the years I had no complaints. They were easy to use, and I never had any issues except for maybe a few instances of downtime, which wasn’t a big deal.

However, just recently, they appeared to have wrongfully erased all the data from my account, and they have not offered any kind of compensation NOR any explanation as to why this happened.

The story goes like this: On October 18, 2015, I received an email telling me that my hosting account had expired, and I had 21 days to renew and keep my cPanel and data. After 21 days, they would permanently erase it from their system (or so their email said so).

At the time, I didn’t have the means to renew immediately, but I did the math and calculated that I had until November 8 to renew safely without a loss of data.

To confirm this, I wrote [email protected], and they responded that indeed, I had until November 8, 2015.

So, on the morning of November 7, 2015, I logged in to renew my site, and noticed that everything had been wiped clean. I got on the phone immediately with one of their customer service representatives regarding this, and, after putting me on hold for awhile, he returned to say that my data had been erased.

When I explained that I had renewed the site within the 21-day period, he understood, yet had absolutely no explanation as to why they had erased my data regardless. Furthermore, he offered ZERO compensation for what I consider to be a severe loss—we’re talking about 7 years of content here.

Obviously I was infuriated over the situation and demanded to speak to his supervisor, who was even LESS helpful. Once again, ZERO explanation and ZERO offers of compensation for my loss. Literally, the only thing he could say was “I’m sorry.” When I asked to speak to his supervisor, he directed me to [email protected]. I wrote them a long email, and have not heard anything since. It’s been 4 days and counting.

The bottom line is, if “I’m sorry” is all that Bluehost.com’s customer service can offer in a situation like mine, then they seriously need to reconsider their business model and their reputation as a reliable company.

In the meantime, I’ve written a formal complaint to their VP of Customer Service, Mr. Ben Lewis. I’m hoping that he can resolve the situation.

I used to like Bluehost. Now they’ve become an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. They have horrible tech service. Servers continually crash because they’re overloaded.

I truly believe that they are planting viruses on the servers so you lose your mind when you try to make repairs. There are so many server dependent issues and the viruses keep replicating regardless. They want to sell you on their overpriced antivirus. This is a perfect example of AMERICAN GREED.

AVOID BLUE HOST LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!! Try host gator instead. I just moved and so far no problems.

10 Very Essential Reasons why you need to *RUN* from Bluehost Shared Hosting service advertised at $3.49. From an Customer who is currently suffering under these atrocities.

Disclaimer: I’ve enjoyed stellar service from these guys for the past 4 year’s. This year 2015 has been the worst experience ever in terms of Cost & Support.
More Money + More Time = Bad Customer Service + Bad Hosting

1. Support is so smug and confident about how awesome and good they are that chances are they might just diss you on the phone when you speak to them, rarely do you find one with good attitude, yawning, appearing uncoordinated are all signs that they are not ready to work or not equipped to work efficiently.
2. Bad Support, just a bunch of monkeys trying to appear smart and dole out standard rehashed scripts for every other question. Almost, glorified front desk. It does seem like the smart ones are the ones who are outsourced and actually understand your issue. How do I know? I’ve spent countless man-hours chasing these nutcases in Sales, Billing, and Legal etc to keep on top of things but each department is uncoordinated with the next. Also their wait time is horrendous. So count on waiting 30-40 minutes easily during the day. Chat is also a good 30-45 minute wait while they put you on music and hold.
3. Too Many Departments : Terms & Billing, Sales, Support and each one has no idea what the other one is doing. So if you have an issue you end up validating your domain, explaining the issue and promptly being moved to some other department because these monkeys don’t want to be bothered enough to work.
4. Sales Department & Support Staff is trained to be misleading and corrupt and use unethical practices to sell you service you don’t need. How do I know? They sold me multiple services from SiteLock that I did not need or did not want. End result, they have got me to spend $700 to scan a domain that is a non-active domain with an SMART scan tool offering $89 + $100 of Premium Services. They eventually tell you they will listen to your phone calls to decide on outcome, and conveniently not offer refunds, because they will opt to eliminate phone calls that only “they” have access to when they promised the services and will not disclose.
5. Bad Hosting Experience, most times the upload won’t work and when you circle back to them they will be prompt to sell you a premium hosting package that’s better than your shared package. They will tell “you” to fix it yourself and will not offer to investigate. I’ve understood that they use shared servers and when the server get’s full it will kick you out.
7. They go by how many files/folders you have and will cap you on that one. Too many images, too bad you have to upgrade your services. Too many files too bad you have to delete some. The laundry list of what you cannot do with shared services is too long to describe. Of course, they are quick to upsell you something that will cost a whole lot more to line their pockets.
8. Slow, Slow Slow. Website loading time is super slow, and when you work directly on your code in the backend or actively on creating blog posts prepare to have the server unexpectedly shut you down, sign you off and start acting up. I hate working on my server directly because it is so unreliable. You can work on a lot of content only to realize that even when you hit the save multiple times, it never worked because the server kicked you out and you need to relogin again.
9. Upsell all the time, when you finally get them to speak with you they sell you something again and again. So even if you are thinking services are cheap upfront the real cost that you will be paying is a whole lot different.
10. Domain name costs change from $11.99 to $14 and fluctuate depending on their mood. I would think it needs to be the same as what you see when you review the name, but no even though you see it as $11.99 you will get charged a whole lot more for JUST domain name. Privacy not included. Why does it change? Beats me.

You said: “I’d like to clarify a few things, but before I do… perhaps a bit of my background:
13 Years as a Unix / Linux Systems Administrator – with emphasis on Web Hosting, specifically PHP / Apache (or Nginx, and a few others) / MySQL
4 Years as a Visualization / Cloud / Cluster Hosting Engineer – with emphasis on Xen, Proxmox, CEPH, MooseFS, etc.
18 Years as a PHP / MySQL Developer.
5 Years developing WordPress plugins and Themes.”

None of that is relevant to how good or bad Bluehost is. The majority opinion from current and former customers suggests that Bluehost is not exactly top drawer, and that is what people will go by.

While I agree that those who host their own WordPress sites should take care of them properly, your plugin approach to security is not the best advice. Learning how to build a strong .htaccess file is a much better solution as adding too many plugins will only degrade the performance of WordPress. Wordfence especially is a resource hog and is aimed at people who do not want to learn other, and better, methods of security.

In my opinion, the best WordPress setup for shared hosting is:

1. A strong .htaccess file that blocks access to wp-admin from everyone but administrators. Set permission to 444.

2. Place wp-config outside the public_html, or if that isn’t possible, set the permission to 400, so it can only be read by WordPress.

3. Don’t use “wp_” as the table prefix, and don’t use “admin” as a login name. Pick a name complete unrelated to your site or identity. Set a display name. Pick a secure password. Remove all references to the author from the theme. Remove all references to WordPress from the theme.

4. Completely remove the native commenting system (including wp-comments-post.php) and replace it with Disqus comments, with the guest commenting turned off. This eliminates the spam problem. Delete wp-trackbacks.php, too. Comments add extra overhead to a WordPress site. Let someone else do the heavy lifitng. The comments can be transferred to the database later, if needed. Just restore wp-comments-post.php and install the Disqus plugin. But really, why?

5. Use a third-party service like imgur for photos. It’s like a free CDN. It also makes things easier when moving servers and will keep people from hotlinking and stealing bandwidth.

6. Find a lightweight theme. Most paid themes are weighed down by unnecessary functions and shortcodes. Find a decent one that does the basics and learn how to modify it. CSS is easy to learn.

7. Keep plugins to a minimum. Almost anything a plugin does can be done a better way by you.

These tips are for those using cheap shared hosts with many limits like Bluehost. Obviously, if you have a VPS or dedicated server, you can, and will want to, do things differently.

And really, Collin, stop wielding your list of credentials like a weapon. You’re not impressing anyone, and you come off as arrogant and rude.

1) The loading speed of all of our reseller hosted sites is horrendously slow. We’ve done everything from our end that we can possibly do but the sites are so freaking slow.

2) The customer service is trash. It takes quite a while to connect to someone and then you get 5-10 minutes between responses because they’re always multi-tasking a bunch of people at once. I’ve never had decent help from Bluehost customer support.

If they even attempt to fix the issue or figure out what it is (which they usually don’t), they usually just try to pawn the blame on you.

3) We had a site that was hacked, despite having a secure password and everything being up to date on the site. We figured we’d contact Bluehost first to clean it and then, they locked the site saying we were using too much CPU. They did however $200 to clean it, I simply demanded they unlock and told them I would clean it myself.

4 hours down the drain but I’m not giving these greedy dicks $200.

4) We can’t send out newsletters or emails from GetResponse. Every single time we try, Bluehost blocks our email capabilities. We can receive but not send. The worst part is, it takes me several contact attempts and an hour of arguing with a rep just to escalate the issue to L2 or the spam team to confirm that they’ve been marked as spamming.

We’re following the CAN spam act, we’re using a double-opt in and only sending out emails to people who choose to send out newsletters. Some of our clients want to keep in touch with customers so we offer that service and every single time we send out a newsletter, blocked.

5) For all of our cPanels, they disabled PhpConfig. Why in the hell? For some reason, new accounts are all made with an old version of Php and we can’t use BackUpWordpress. Yet again, we contact Bluehost for a solution and they tell us that it’s not possible anymore and they can’t manually change it. What? Are you joking? I’ve never once heard of a host that refused to change the Php version of a site.

6) We can’t even login to cPanels from our browsers anymore. We have to use port 2082 to login and what do you know, we contacted Bluehost YET AGAIN for a solution. The exact response I got was “yeah that doesn’t work anymore, we made changes to cPanel and you can’t do that anymore.”

I realize this company used to be good but they are utterly awful right now. They’re slow, their reps have all been replaced with minimum wage workers that don’t know what they’re doing, they’re understaffed, if you have any problems, it will be your fault and they’ll for sure have some paid options for you that won’t do anything.

Go to Site5 or any other host that hasn’t been bought out by the vulture capitalist known as EIG yet. We have to contact Bluehost twice a week and I don’t know why I even bother trying to contact them. They’re utterly useless.

I once used bluehost – about two years ago. Since it was endorsed in WordPress and there was some promo going on there at Bluehost. So I decided to jump in. It was terrible! site going down frequently, slow speed and all those trouble. I stopped using after 3 months. Will never look back at them.

1,000 times – YES! I just broke up with Bluehost, and this was the reason I gave them:

“I’ve been a longtime user of Bluehost (I believe about 7 years). And I had been a happy customer until last year. It really seems the company has gone down hill in that time. I really wish I could choose more than one option above for my reasons. I selected “Unsatisfactory Experience with Support,” but I would also choose Email Issues > Delivery Issues, Server Performance Issues > Uptime/downtime, Speed/slowness, and Software Compatibility, Unsatisfactory Experience with Sales, and MOJO Marketplace. I have had so many issues in just the past year that it’s not even funny. Add to that your loooong Customer Service hold times and some really awful customer service representatives mixed in there and you’ve created a very unhappy customer. I honestly thought I was going crazy thinking that maybe it was just me, that Bluehost couldn’t have possibly really changed that much in one year – but it’s not just me. This article puts it very well: [I linked this article here]. So, in short, we’ve had a good run, but I’m breaking up with you. It’s not me, it’s you, and I really hope you get the help you need to get back to the top.”

I actually moved to SiteGround and I couldn’t be happier. Their customer support is absolutely amazing. I even asked them to help me with the breakup. I also want to note that my sites sped up immediately after the transfer. Bye Felicia! 😛

Bluehost is forcing their customers to use their own nameservers in order to use the WordPress Hosting package. I find this quite silly and nothing more than an attempt to make it more difficult in case you want to move out in the future. You practically cannot make it work unless you follow their exact requirement.

What’s even worse, if you do agree to change your nameservers, it will not migrate the existing DNS records. This is one way to break your domain configuration unless you carefully copy the records one by one.

Bluehost sold me an Sitelock Find option costing me upwards of $400 and tole me that it will fix malware. I was wrong, within a month I was given to understand that my $100 spent on the Malware cleanup the sold via Sitedoctor and the Sitelock find that came upto $500 was a waste of money.

Why? Because my site got attacked by malware again within a month. Their recommendation now, buy Sitelock Fix another $89 per website and also buy $100 Sitedoctor to clean the malware.

I’ve now spent close to a $1000 in wasted time and money and not close to closing on this situation as yet.

Please be wary about bluehost, they have partnered with other companies are are out to make a fast buck. This is unfortunately my experience after a many number of years of enjoying their stellar customer service and hosting service. The landscape definitely is changing and the tactics are getting more cut throat and greedy.

Several of our clients host with Bluehost. Are they the same as having your own Dedicated or VPS server? NO. They are a commodity level SHARED hosting company.

Does Bluehost work well for MOST WordPress sites? YES — if you have reasonable expectations, and are a responsible website owner…

Ask yourself these questions:
Do I realize that Bluehost is SHARED hosting?
Do I have a development/testing/debugging server that I can transfer hacked sites to so I can clean them up?
Do I clean up my broken site BEFORE asking the hosting company to re-enable my account? — cuz you know, it would be like totally jerk-faced of me to expect all of the other accounts on that shared server to suffer from my irresponsibility.
Am I hosting ONLE one (1) site in my hosting account?
Am I using “admin” as my username?
Am I using the free “WordFence” plugin?
Is “WordFence” set to automatically update itself?
Am I using the free “Sucuri” Plugin?
Do all of my WordPress Database tables start with “wp_”?
Do I keep WordPress core up to date?
Do I keep all of my installed plugins up to date?
Do I keep all of my installed themes up to date?
Do I run daily security audits on my site? – or do I wait until my site has become a problem for all of the other accounts on the SHARED Server that I run on?
Do I make daily backups of my site to a cloud backup service (Amazon / Dropbox / etc / etc)?
Do I make understand PHP (and WordPress Core) well enough to find security holes in Plugins, WordPress Core, and all installed Themes?
Do I submit proposed security patches to the Plugin Vendors, WordPress Core, and the Theme Vendors? — and implement them in my own site.
Did I use the FREE Sucuri Plugin to “Harden” my WordPress installation?
Do I understand Linux and SSH well enough to find NON WordPress based compromises in my Site?
Is SSH enabled in my hosting account?
Do I know what to do about them when I find them?
Do I understand how to use .htaccess to prevent direct code execution in my wp-content and uploads folders? (as well as whatever other folders various plugins create that need to be secured)
Do I read the change-logs before I update anything?
Do I login to my admin dashboard every day to check for updates?
Am I using Plugins or Themes that cannot be updated (because I DON’T HAVE A VALID LICENSE)?
Does someone else do these for me? — and do I expect a hosting company to do this? if so WHY?
Is it my responsibility to maintain and take care of my website? (many blame the hosting company – weird don’t you thin — to shirk one’s responsibilities and pass the buck to someone that really has nothing to do with it — that’d be like a Vegan complaining that their Rare Steak wasn’t cooked enough.. makes no sense whatsoever)
etc.. etc..

If the answer to any of these questions is NO, then use wordpress.com and stop using the open source community version of WordPress. or Hire someone to do these things for you.

Bluehost is no more insecure than any other commodity level SHARED hosting company. Bluehost only shuts down sites that are problematic for their other customers. (why in the world do people think they can be the only one on the whole planet that is entitled to use any server resources when they are paying less than $20/mo for hosting?)

EVERY OTHER SHARED HOSTING COMPANY SHUTS DOWN SITES THAT ARE BAD TOO.

IT IS NOT YOUR HOSTING COMPANY’S RESPONSIBILITY TO MAINTAIN YOUR WEBSITE. IT IS *YOUR* RESPONSIBILITY TO EITHER MAINTAIN IT, OR HIRE SOMEONE ELSE TO.

There you have it.. My two cents.

And NO, I don’t work for Bluehost. And yes I have several clients at other commodity level SHARED hosting providers. And yes I have several clients with their own VPS / Dedicated server. And Yes I have a few clients that host on their own network of multiple servers.

And YES their sites do get compromised sometimes. And YES they or I fix them. We never ask the hosting provider to do our job.

Thanks for the comment. Collin’s my son’s name so you’ve clearly got a good thing going there. We actually don’t say Bluehost sucks in our article anywhere. We do comment on how support and reliability have slipped, but even beyond that, this article is a lot more about WordPress.org saying it’s one of the “best and brightest” of the hosting world, which just hasn’t been the case in our experience. Appreciate you stopping by. Don’t be a stranger!

Thanks for the reply.. Perhaps I could have been more clear.. For what WordPress is (and for that matter is not), Bluehost is one of the “best and brightest” SHARED hosting solutions there is for WordPress — mainly because everything else in that realm of hosting is pretty much the same REHL / Cpanel hosting. That said, and more for clarification purposes, if you read the end of my reply you will notice that I have many clients that do not use Bluehost (some have needs that far outweigh the possibilities of Bluehost).

I’d like to clarify a few things, but before I do… perhaps a bit of my background:
13 Years as a Unix / Linux Systems Administrator – with emphasis on Web Hosting, specifically PHP / Apache (or Nginx, and a few others) / MySQL
4 Years as a Visualization / Cloud / Cluster Hosting Engineer – with emphasis on Xen, Proxmox, CEPH, MooseFS, etc.
18 Years as a PHP / MySQL Developer.
5 Years developing WordPress plugins and Themes.

So.. to be very succinct and hopefully a lot more clear…
1. Bluehost is just as good as every other SHARED hosting provider for WordPress (and honestly better than most).
2. The reason most people have issues hosting on Bluehost is that they themselves have not done their part to maintain their websites.
3. The reason Bluehost (and all of the other SHARED hosting providers) shut down accounts (sometimes without notice) is to protect the integrity of the server itself.
3-a. If i lock someone out of my house, it is because I don’t want them causing me problems.
4. If someone has a bad experience hosting WordPress on Bluehost — and that someone doesn’t correct their negligence of their website – the WILL HAVE A BAD EXPERIENCE WITH EVERY SHARED HOSTING PROVIDER.
5. If SHARED hosting isn’t enough for someone’s WordPress site, there are other alternatives.
5-a. SHARED hosting IS enough for MOST WordPress installs, and Bluehost’s specific server setup is among the best of all SHARED hosting providers. (I have personally toured their data center, discussed technical things with their management and their server technicians, as well as with their network engineers.) I have also done this with several other hosting providers. Bluehost – thus far has the best, most stable, and most extendable (without network downtime) setup of all SHARED hosting providers that I’ve extensively looked into.
5-a. I did all that to make sure I was making an informed decision when making a hosting recommendation to my clients.
6. So Bluehost supports WordPress with some kickbacks.. That does not negate their network and setup.
7. Bluehost just recently (late spring 2015 through mid Summer) finished installing a whole load of new, top-level servers for their SHARED hosting customers.
8. I never said that you (or any commentators for that matter) said anything to indicate that Bluehost Sucks — didn’t even use the word Suck or Sucks at all. [Ctrl] + F … for “Suck”
9. Some commentators did actually say that they suck. Well they don’t. Irresponsible webmasters suck.
10. I really was replying more towards the irresponsible webmasters on this thread that B/Flame Bluehost for their own lack of responsibility towards their own website.

** No I am not an “affiliate” or otherwise related to WP Site Care ** (I just wish people would take some level of responsibility for their website — or hire someone that can)

So, if you don’t want to, don’t know how, or simply can’t take the time to maintain your WordPress site (wherever/however you host it) there is a solution for you… https://www.wpsitecare.com/plans/

Another thought… Saying that Bluehost isn’t among the best in their class of hosting without touring their data center, and interviewing (face-to-face) their staff/management/techs/engineers seems contemplative at best. Actually I thank you for that. People should contemplate these things. (Yes, I realize that this entire paragraph is an assumption on my part… so please correct my assumption if it is unfounded.)

And, the final thought.. Your son has an excellent name — he will grow up to be a well-rounded genius, liked by all. I am sure of it. 😉

My best regards,

Collin.

ps.. Other good hosting providers:
Digital Ocean
Linode
Hostmonster
Godaddy (If you can get past their egregious terms of srevice)
Dreamhost
Aplus.net was good a few years back.. (not sure now, it’s been a while since I investigated them)

p.ps.. My personal experience with “WordPress” optimized hosting has NOT been good, they all seem to have caching problems, and are prohibitive to a whole lot of common and very useful plugins.. like for example: Woocommerce.

Bluehost has twice, with no notice, deactivated my account claiming I was hosting malware. Both time I spent over 30 minutes on hold to find out what they claimed the problem was. They offered to clean it for me in 48 hours if I paid them $200. The problem was a hack into a WordPress plugin. I spent hours cleaning it up and they couldn’t ever give me guidance on what they claimed the problem was. Finally one person gave the the line of code that was a problem and I was able to fix it in minutes.

In the meantime, they lock my account so I can’t even download my files and go the F somewhere else. Bluehost is trash.

I’ve finally decided enough is enough. Bluehost has cost me more money and headaches then any other aspect of my businesses operations process. If the above did not scare you away from trusting this archaic beast with your money, time and business, then allow me:

Incident #1

• This past February I launched a website for my clients new business. Immediately this client complained that they weren’t receiving any emails from the contact forms on their website. I spent over an hour checking every aspect on the website’s backend and making sure my client had their email client set up properly.
• Finally I contact Bluehost to ask what might be happening. They told me the issue was definitely not on their end. I spend another hour double checking everything and contact them again. Again, they tell me it’s something to do with my web forms or my client’s email app (yahoo mail).
• A few days later my client contacts me saying that it’s not just emails from the web forms that aren’t showing up, it’s all emails to that address! I contact Bluehost immediately asking them what is up and the service rep is just as utterly useless as the other two. They tell me their supervisor will contact me within 24 hours.
• 72 hours later, still no word and so I contact them again. This time the non-english speaking rep assures me the supervisor will contact me via email “today”.
• 4 days later I get an email from Bluehost telling me I should contact yahoo (really!?). I contact yahoo and they immediately reply that there are no issues on their end, it’s definitely my web host. I copy and paste their message to me, to my response to Bluehost.
• It has now been over a week and my client has not been able to receive ANY emails. This is the week of their businesses launch, remember. Just panic and anger all around the board. I call Bluehost and demand an answer to what is happening and at least a temporary solution. The rep connects me to his supervisor. I explain the back story, again, and he tells me he’ll call me back after he reviews everything. I literally yelled, “NO! If you hang up on me without giving me a solution I will be filing a lawsuit on my behalf and my clients behalf!”
• After about 30 mins of waiting while on hold he returns and tells me that they have escalated the ticket to the highest level of tech support. He explains that something is wrong with their server and nobody knows what happened. I ask to be transferred to another server and he tells me he cannot do that, but promised the issue would be solved in 24 hours by their “high-tech specialists”. Seriously.
• 3 more days go past (I am running a business with dozens of other clients, by myself at this point), and I decide we need to pull the plug. After almost 2 weeks of lost emails for a brand new startup, I called Bluehost up and canceled the account, transferred my clients website to another host and paid for the entire year myself and then wrote them a check for a 10% refund on their website out of goodwill (and an attempt to keep a seriously pissed of client).
• In the end, I lost the client and over $1000 (in refunds and purchasing hosting for them).

Incident #2

• For some reason, while I stopped using Bluehost for my clients websites I kept my own company’s website with them. Last month I realized my website was loading very slowly so I began to implement performance optimizations. I did everything that Google and YSlow recommended. These optimizations definitely helped but my site was still loading very slowly (9.7s – 12.4s).
• I contacted Bluehost support and asked them what else I could do to speed up my site. They told me I should upgrade my account to the VPS Pro, assuring me I’d drop my page load speed down to under 4s. Naively, I bit the bullet and upgraded.
• A week later I contacted them again because my site was still loading slow (8.4s – 10.2s). They told me I should be using a CDN and (surprise, surprise) that I could subscribe to one inside of their cPanel (for $15 extra a month). I again bit the bullet.
• Now I was paying $45/mo and my site was loading at just 7.5s – 9.7s. I contacted them again and they basically gave me the run around, saying my page was too big/heavy (1.45mb), said I should add more CPU cores and RAM to the server… all in broken english and with very poor grammar. I laughed to myself for about 30 seconds and then told them to transfer me to sales, where I proceeded to cancel my subscription.
• Now I’m with WPEngine and what do ya’ know!? My website loads in 2.8s – 4.5s, smh. Oh, and I’m spending $15 less a month.

I signed up for BlueHost when I switched over from free WordPress.com blog to a hosted blog at WordPress.org. I got their name from a list at WPBeginners.com who will help you do the switch for free. (I would have paid for this, but I don’t know anyone who provides this service except them.)

My first experience with BlueHost: they auto-dialed me, put me on hold for over 5 mins, then I was told by their robot voice to leave a message, and someone would call me back. Their message box was filled, and the system hung up on me.

This is a huge red flag. This company clearly doesn’t have their act together. I’m getting out now while it’s early and choosing another hosting company.

Used BlueHost for the past 6-years for hosting and registering my domain name. Had a credit card on file for last 4-years, with all monthly/yearly payments set to auto-renew, which were charged like clockwork.

Well, BlueHost didn’t auto-renew my yearly domain name registration charge last month and they said it was my fault. Bluehost did charge the same credit card the normal monthly hosting fee, security and back-up but for some reason the auto-renew did not work for my domain name.

Bluehost’s rep was really nasty about the whole thing. And when I asked him to move files to the .Net, he put me on hold for 20 minutes only to announce it was moved to some hosting site I have never heard of in my life.

I loved bluehost before and am in utter shock right now at how unhelpful, unprofessional customer service has become. Bluehost has ALWAYS been great in the past, and this was not my fault.

I have now learned that there is an actual name for this and it is called Cyber/Domain Squatting….whatever it is it is this kind of stuff is sneaky, sketchy and sleazy. I NEVER expected Bluehost to stoop this low to make a buck.

Sorry to hear that Kate. Yes, a couple of the big names go rampant with domain squatting. The elephant in the room being GoDaddy. One minute you are searching for the availability of high value domain which you find to be available. Come back to buy it the next week, it’s gone!

No prizes for guessing who the registrant is. GoDaddy! Guess what? They are willing to sell it to you, at just the price of $1200; which was valued at $12 a week ago.

Just wanted give you a heads up. GoDaddy and EIG owned companies are to be taken with a grain of salt. I know I wouldn’t be throwing my money at them. I have had nothing but bad experiences.

Hope you find better services for your site. There are some really good ones out there.

I have 2 customers that have Bluehost. Poor servers, even poorer technical support, and seemingly an unwillingness to address the issues. Both are transferring to new hosting. Don’t know why WordPress endorses them at all. I have had several tech support chats with various hosting companies from time to time. None of them except Bluehost has ever directed me to search on Google for a max_Input_vars problem. One even suggested I hire a developer..lol If that would have been my customer they would have just gone into a terrible downward spiral. If we treated our customers like that we would get fired.Oh well fortunately there is

I had moved all of the sites that we support elsewhere but one from Bluehost. I receive and email on the 07/12/2015 at 7:03pm telling me that my hosting is “expiring..” and that I need to renew. I had made a decision to move it anyways so logged on and was planning on backing it up for the move. To my surprise, I find that Bluehost had already shut the site down demanding money. I called them and was able to reach someone (after a 10 minute wait on the phone) explaining the situation. I won’t bore you with the details but here is a summary:

1. He (Brian from Bluehost doesn’t know how it happened) but he couldn’t do anything since it is Sunday.

2. The ONLY way for me to get back on my site was pay for a month – guess what, you can’t. You have to pay for 3 months. @ $44 and change.

3. I told them it was not right to send an email letting the customer know the same time you shut down a site. That’s just poor customer service. He didn’t care. See #2.

Bottom line, I didn’t have a choice but to pay them and now fighting to get a refund on the amount for the remaining two months. BTW, I opened a dispute with Paypal and Bluehost immediately canceled my account. What a classy company.

I used to have quite a few accounts with them but their level of service, professionalism and reliability has gone downhill. After this fiasco, I will tell my other colleagues to stay away from Bluehost – sad.

We signed up for Bluehost back in Oct. of 2013. We were told by their sales rep that the load (25k books) we needed to place on the website could be handled on the program he recommended and we bought. At the point we reached around 4500 books our website crashed, and we crashed the other 70k websites that were sharing our server (so Bluehost actually told us). So, in Bluehosts infinite wisdom, they moved us to a VPS server program and told us that will definitely handle the 25k books we wanted to load on the site. We reached 6000 books, our website crashed again, during the busiest time of year (from Nov. to Dec.) and we thousands of dollars. Bluehost blamed it us (yes, they actually told us it was our fault for putting so many books on our website) and then when we sent them the copied conversation actually showing that they said we could do that without any issues, they blamed it on Woocommerce and Word Press. We left Bluhost for a far superior server (Corecommerce) we have had no issues on the new server, and we really do not miss Bluehost at all. We can now actually focus on our business and not our website. This is especially important since we are book sellers, not website builders. In short: Bluehost Sucks! We DO NOT recommend them at all!

have been trying to get wp installed. for the last couple of days.. contacted customer support.
u know what they said,, i quote u not..” yea, its been hit or miss lately” we are trying to fix it. i said, what do i do? just wait? they said .”yep”, i had this same problem about 2-3 months ago.. took about 3 hrs to get wp installed

I had problems with my bluehost site as well. Their tools are sloppy, such as log files only giving you one day worth of visitor info, nested .gz files for logfiles, etc.

During site development I needed to do a restore after a bad woocommerce update. Their tool was not working so I contacted customer service. They dumped my entire site back to the wrong revision, and lost the good version causing me tons of work to manually fix the site. No apology was made, they placed blame on me when I specifically requested a certain date to restore to.

To REALLY make me despise them even more, I started hosting at smugmug, and was told clearly that I could cancel my hosting account and keep the domain registered at bluehost to direct traffic to the new site without any issues. My site is now offline and will be for up to 7 days while I transfer to a new domain registrar – bluehost says they cannot support DNS forwarding unless I pay for a hosting account! So they actually sell you domains that are essentially unusable unless all you want is to park a domain (which you can do cheaper elsewhere). Useless.

I contacted 3 different customer service reps about my businesses website being offline due to bluehost’s error, (their cancellation form even said I could still use the domain!!!) and all were fairly abrupt and apathetic, made ZERO offer to right the situation- even though they could EASILY restore the old site and forwarding until a domain transfer completes (I know this because I can restore the site in one click if I pay them ridiculous upgraded hosting at four times the price I was paying). One of the arrogant untrained service monkeys said it wasn’t his fault that a corporate email and then cancellation form blatantly made a false statement and that there was nothing at all he could do. The attitude I sense from the company is blatant incompetence combined with apathy. What does bluehost care, they are making millions off of newcomers to web hosting.

Fortunately for me I have moved on to greener pastures, but I sure hate looking dumb having a business site offline for a week with no help.

Their pricing sucks anyway and they have deliberately confusing renewals that make you jump through hoops to get the same ‘low’ rates after your first year. They always put you in for upgrades you don’t want and make it hard to turn them off prior to paying.

Good to see that these problems were not just with me. I’ve used Bluehost for a few years, but I’ve had consistent problems the last six or so months, and even more recently my website is down and times out more often than not. I plan to switch over this weekend to a new provider, and hope the slow response times will end.

Thanks for the site confirming the problem was not just with my WP site.

I am currently with HostGator, which is owned by EIG who also owns…. BlueHost! I find it funny that HostGator’s fees are much higher when they are owned by the same company and offer the same services. Can someone explain why these 2 are competition, yet no one knows that they are owned by the same company.

Fiat owns Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Lancia, Maserati, and all the Chrysler brands, including Dodge, Jeep, Ram, and SRT. It does not prevent them from competing with each other; it’s not like they are the only ones on the market.

Bluehost and HostGator are for the most part independent companies who only share some aspects of their service (if you look up their servers you’ll see that all of EIG are on Unified Layer).

I’m so glad I did a search for Blue Host reviews before signing up with them!! Something told me to just look a little deeper before going in. Thank you everyone for your honest feedback on this particular host. Thank you Ryan and a few others that have mentioned Siteground as a reputable company!! You have saved me a lot of time and aggravation.

Bluehost is a big disappointment. Their website web hosting information is inaccurate and misleading. They spend too much effort trying to force you to spend more money. I had three major issues with Bluehost.

1. Their starter plan indicates that it includes 5 parked domains. But they don’t explain that you have to pay extra for each domain.

2. When you set-up WordPress, the online workflow makes it almost impossible to select a free WordPress theme.

3. I purchased the Starter plan for $60 but was charged $119. When I complained to Customer Service, they provided a partial refund. When I asked why they overcharged me, they indicated that I must have used the refresh button on my browser during the check-out process, so all the default added services were including in my purchase. But their online e-commerce workflow does not include a confirmation page or a receipt page or a confirmation email. If it did, I would have seen this problem immediately. Instead I saw the problem when I got my monthly credit card bill. But Bluehost only does full refunds within 3 days.

4. After having so many negative experiences, I decided to move my domain and web hosting to another service. But ICANN regulates require that you wait 60 days. Hence, after moving my domain and cancelling my Bluehost account, they refused to give me a full refund under their ‘money back guarantee policy’ which is only good for 30 days. That is useless when you consider the ICANN regulation.

If Bluehost can’t manage with their current pricing, they should raise their price or change their marketing or be more specific about what is included and what is extra. But I want to control how my money is spent and I don’t appreciate their scam tactics and unethical business practices.

Just run away when its Bluehost. I have my website and it runs WooCommerce. On my other hosting i had things run perfectly fine. After paypal transaction orders were getting processed automatically. But not the case on Bluehost. When contacted them back about some security loophole or maybe Varnish Cache problem that they have on their server all they could come up with answer was contact your web developer.

Hello guys i am the web developer. I know how WordPress works from past 5-6 years. I know how thing works. I am telling there is some security problem which doesn’t let the IPN to pass and hence orders weren’t processing automatically.

They won’t listen as you know. Back to my old hosting. Avoid Bluehost if you need serious hosting.

I wish that I wasn’t even reading this post, because that would mean that I was super happy with my Bluehost support. I started with a shared plan because of the recommendation I saw on WordPress.org’s website. I was mostly impressed with their service because I didn’t have any other experience with hosting. When compared to GoDaddy, I found that I liked it more, but GoDaddy shouldn’t be the standard by which to judge hosting.

I eventually upgraded to a reseller plan, and it was great for a while until I found that they were allowing simplescripts in that reseller accounts to deprecate. I don’t have as many outages lately that I used to have, but I get complaints from my clients of slow speeds.

My biggest issue is that support recently has been really bad. I expect beginner level support on shared plans, but reseller specific support should be staffed with people who not only know what they are talking about, but who have been through these things themselves.

There are a few that really know their stuff, and I’m lucky and grateful when I get them, but there are some other people on their team who seem green…and that’s not what you want when you’re paying for premium support.

I haven’t seen any clear winners in any reviews for other hosting options. They all seem to be a give and take, and some with affiliate bias. Bluehost has a decent market share and just needs to get their priorities in order. I’m very close to migrating over 40 sites away from Bluehost to some other solution. I just need to find it first.

Bluehost RUN ASAP!!!!! I chose Bluehost for our company’s webhost several years ago. Once a reliable responsive organization they have gone to the absolute worst customer service that we have ever experienced with any organization of any kind. They totally ruined our website and grossly misrepresented the services we paid for. Malwear hit our site which was supposed to be protected WHICH WE PAID FOR!! Then charged $189 to fix what they were supposed to protect in the first place. Then they promptly ruined it by eliminating the front page and all widgets and plugins. After hours and I mean 7+ hours mostly on hold and after 5 different tech support that claimed the site backup and all these features were missing. Finally a senior IT person fixed what they damaged in, no kidding, 10 minutes. We can go on and on, but don’t have the time to cover it all. We are to soon move our webhost after we can insure a backup is made. RUN Forest RUN!!!!!

I hate Bluehost !!! Bluehost SUCKS beyond belief! I signed up in November of 2014 and paid an annual fee and moved SIXTY websites over to them. Not one month later they announce they no longer will sell a reseller package and took ALL THAT MONEY people paid for an annual good deal like I did–and used that money to do TV web ads targeted at just developing web sites for people directly. Sure we got to the end of the contact but moving is a pain and we would never have signed for some temporary relationship. AND service sucks since they changed stream.

Meaning Bluehost financed this real goal (real profit maker) with a fake offer [fake meaning no intent to really keep long term reselling accounts–but sold them cheap to pull in BIG revenue] This is close to PONZI type scheme where Bluehost cannot do a profitable venture without the profits of the less profitable venture (Reseller accts) This causes great stress to those who did sign up and have to move a ton of sites all over again. Now the big issue is many of our 60 websites being DOWN ALL THE TIME because they are shoved a bunch of shady people on same server as our sites.

SO Bluehost UPTIME is a lie. And Bluehost packages in general are about as safe as Enron who sold air.

I would have preferred to stay with Bluehost but they obviously don’t care about the small players and just want the big bucks now. i am offline at present trying to get my new hosting going. Seems like it is all about the do re mi now. I think a hosting co could clean up by offering lower cost plans for the smaller players like myself who really are low maintenence

I have been with Hostgator for a while now and still have a WP multiste network running on their shared grid hosting platform. It runs well but I am running out of room and wanted to get a deal on a VPS. I am keeping my host on hostgator but I’m also starting a new project and will need the full resources of a VPS for that purpose. I found a deal on Bluehost; first month around $15 and around $30 a month after that. I set it up and installed a WP network… I have done this more than a dozen times and I did it exactly the way that I know how to on my new VPS… The wildcard is all set, all of the edits have been made to wp-config.php and .htacess. and I installed sunrise.php for domain mapping. I was able to successfully install the network but after that when I create a site it redirects me back to the domain when I try to visit and back to the main domain admin pages when I attempt to visit the dashboard. I have been trying to troubleshoot it for 2 days but I did not do anything differently in the setup than I have ever done before with any other host… Admittedly this is my first time using a VPS as opposed to shared hosting so it could potentially be something to do with the server configuration… I reached out to Bluehost. They took more than 24 hours to respond and their response was pretty lame. I took the domain with the VPS package and I like it… Not sure if I can take it with me if I cancel the package but I may cancel anyway and go with one of the ones you recommended above. You have any idea what would cause this issue with Bluehost?

I have been with Bluehost for years because of their excellent service and solid reputation. However, I will need to look elsewhere as their packages have increased exponentially. I’m told I was on a “starter” package and that it was nice for promotional purposes. When did this change??? Bluehost had one package and it was great, great price, great service, and now they have gone the way of so many before them seeking more money with increased traffic and not giving the customer better options. That is so sad to see.

I am using Bluehost for 2+ years, I never faced any issue from their side, only once my server went down but that was my fault as too much traffic came on my targeted event which breached TOS, but Bluehost support was so friendly, they heard me carefully and after clarifications my server get up again. I personally recommend blue host to everyone!

When everyone is praising about Bluehost, I think this is a really different article. I agree with your view. As WordPress is now a popular blogging platform, I think they should be more generic rather than favoring someone, unless they have their own hosting company.

This article is great, I had read a lot of reviews but all of them were fake I guess. I made the mistake to move a website from godaddy to bluehost. I was looking for the best option to speed up the website and now its super slow. I am now looking into wp-engine hosting but can’t seem to find a good review.

I agree that bluehost is not that good. Jetpack informed me on a way to often basis that my sites were down. I wish i would have switched to siteground when i switched and instead went with inmotion and not that happy with them either. I am always getting resource overages. Not to go off topic but it may help others. I have disabled every cron, I have to manually back up sites and at this point it is difficult to switch again with clients having it people that have to get involved for every switch. The endorsement from wordpress.org does lead people like myself who went with them at the time being new to WP.

I signed up for a static IP on a shared host. It seems that the products are diverging and to bring more people to the fold, BH has started to move lower cost hosting to large cesspool servers to keep costs down.. it is a biz after all.
In the last 8 mos. , WP sites that were “snappy” on load.. are now really slow.. even w. cache turned on.. i can only image that this is because they want folks to purchase “up” to the new services.
Otherwise, up-time and support is OK for me. But, I keep my tech support calls to early morning or between 4-5p their local time.
Glad this post is here.. the WP feature needs a Speed test verification vs. standard server load times.
to see who else shares your server use these tools “

Bluehost is awful and I am currently looking for another hosting company. Their 1-click wp installation does not work lol and thus has been an ongoing issue since the end of march! Awful support … can someone please direct me at how I can move my wp sites from bluehost to another hosting provider

I just moved from godaddy to bluehost and thinking of moving back to godaddy. Godaddy has a really good plan for wordpress and the speed is really fast. I have over 10 websites still with godaddy. I was having problems with one because of traffic so decided to move it to bluehost and it works ok but to slow even if there isn’t anyone online. I would recommend to try godaddy, they have a really easy migrating tool if you get the manage wordpress plan, basically it transfers the website to a temp domain and all you have to do after is change the nameservers and that’s it.

Reading this post was spot on for me. I’ve been with GoDaddy and extremely disappointed in them all around. I’m therefore searching a new host and I was about to sign up with Blue Host but still had some reservations….I’ll look a little bit more before making a decision.

I currently have a wordpress.com blog and I was hoping to start taking my blogging more seriously and moving it to wordpress.org. Unfortunately, I know very little about web hosting and how to set things up.

My budget for the blog is probably $10 a month at most. I’m not really sure where to start.
Think you could help me out?

Hi, I appreciate this up to date article and advice. I have been on blue host since the start of my website in 2014 and in the past 4 months I’ve had nothing but a huge headache of my site crashing all of a sudden, not loading, connections dropping while I’m editing posts on wordpress.. I have everything up to date, minimal pluggins, and don’t mess with the back-end. I can’t help but wonder if I switched services if my sanity would be saved!?

It could be a hosting issue, but it could possible be some time of issue with WordPress or your traffic growing as well. If you shoot as a note at hello at wpsitecare.com, we’ll be happy to take a look and give you a recommended course of action, whether it be optimizing your website, or heading for a new host.

Same here. Everytime they get me up and going again it’s not long before I am shut down again. Last time they suggested getting rid of any unused plugins. Its aggravating. Its shut down right now actually.

Also people are signing onto my wordpress site from some page I cant seem to find. I dont know where they’re doing it. Its all spammers.

I regret my decision to have hosting on bluehost. I don’t what and how they treat there customer, but all I know this one is worst sever ever had in my life. I used hostgator simultaneously for making wordpress site, while page loads in millisecond from hostgator it does load even after tens of second from bluehost. One biggest mistake I did is to claim free domain with hosting. For first year domain registration cost $2 with godaddy, also they provide privacy protection displaying your name only. As far as I know no one in this world will provide privacy protection for free like godaddy.

I agree with almost everyone. Bluehost has horrible servers and even worse service. They even held my database hostage because I would not renew. They were able to do this because their backup wizard wasn’t working in order for me to grab the db while my account was active.

Unfortunately I agree with with everyone. I’ve been with bluehost for more that 5 years. But last year things got really bad. Sites going down frequently and poor Support.
I have when I open the Support chart window when it says 01 minute. It’s never one minute.

Blue host has the poorest performance and service. Wp sites work very slow on blue host servers and quite often they are down anyway, plus you are very restricted to just few sites.
While your site is down there is no support from bluehost.

I came across your article and it is very formative. Thank you for that! However, I am still struggling to find what is the best host? I am looking for unlimited data and bandwidth as well as low price due to adding photos and videos to our blog that contained ASL for our Deaf audience. I would appreciate any advice/recommendations that you may have. Thank you.

I’m not sure there’s any host that exists that can truly give you unlimited storage and bandwidth for a low price. Those items don’t really go hand in hand. That said, we’ve been really happy with SiteGround for sites with 100,000 visits or fewer. If you have more traffic than that, reply and we can give a few other suggestions.

Had several problems with bluehost, but as I had different domains, I kept my account. Now they took down all my website with not any warning saying i had “malicious” code. Ridiculous, they can put my websites back again if I pay 50usd for their whatever doctor service.

This is blackmail, there are no malicious code on my account.

Please do not try bluehost, they will make you regret

stay away

Any anonymous there to make Bluehost suffer?Please.

CONS:

You have to wait for AT least 45 min for a support online, even if it says remaining time 12 minutes, if goes more and more, everytime

They take your websites down and blackmail you

Website not very fast

Horrible email system

The support will very rarely answer your questions, is like talking with a 4 years old indian kid

All the addons offered are useless

You think you pay little but other services linked to your account are very expensive

I think you nailed it. Money Talks. I think bluehost is the most recommended host out there for bloggers because they have one of the highest affiliate programs. They might be the most popular, but not the best!

Has anyone worked with WPEngine? I’m comparing WPEngine to Bluehost currently. Bluehost is way more cost effective, but I’m worried about reliability and speed now.

I’m deploying WP sites for my clients. My goal is to install 100+ this year. Each would need email account(s). I want the best hosting for the best price/performance. If you have recommendations on best hosting for this type of WP deployment biz, I’m all ears.

We’ve used WP Engine pretty extensively for a number of things. The client management piece would likely be quite a bit easier with WP Engine’s setup. That said, they don’t provide email hosting so you’d have to set that up separately. In terms of speed and reliability, WP Engine is definitely going to perform better in both of those area, but it’s also going to be a lot more expensive than Bluehost. Mainly depends on what your market is, how much they’re willing to pay, and how much personal time you’re willing to invest in managing things.

I anticipate these clients to be down-market, small businesses. Mostly a professional presence. I wouldn’t anticipate these sites to grow tremendously or have a high volume per month. WP Engine just seems too expensive for this business model. I’m comparing BlueHost, DreamHost, and Cloudways. Seems to be better option for deploying several, small sites.

Yes, it is true, but also many small business customers tend to ask many features. in terms of VPS there are several solutions (at the moment I am using bluehost), but, for e-mail hosting, I am using http: // server mx.com, because for many times to too many customers that I had spent a lot of time to solve the basic problems easy due to the lack of support.

I switched from Start Logic to Blue Host, mainly because of WordPress’ recommendation. At first, my blog seemed to be fast and reliable. That was less than a year ago. Now? Jetpack informs me when it goes down and with Blue Host, my blog goes down on a daily basis for at least an hour at a time, sometimes more times a day. I’m trying to work with them to resolve this, but this shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Honestly, I have yet to find a hosting company that doesn’t have something wrong with it. *sigh*

I signed up for this service a couple weeks ago, but saw immediately that it was not at all what I wanted. Everywhere I went to do something with my site (add text, links, images) was just trying to sell me something.

Despite their “no hidden fees, anytime money-back guarantee”, there were plenty of hidden fees, and, although I sent a cancellation request within an hour or two of applying for the service, I did not get a full refund. They kept $50, saying that my cancellation was not within the 3-day period (how is this an “anytime money-back guarantee”?), because they completely disregarded my initial request, and, when I followed up a few days later, further delayed the cancellation process by saying that I had to first confirm the account before I could cancel it.

Despite my efforts to resolve the matter, they continue to refuse to issue a full refund. I don’t see how I could see this as anything other than a scam. Do yourself a favor; don’t waste your money on this company.

I had used BlueHost in the past with good luck and recommended them to clients. The last year everything about the service has gone way downhill though. Sites loading unbelievably slow, downtime, very long customer service waits. The customer service has been poor and rude in a lot of cases when I finally do get a hold of them. I found this article and wanted to make sure there are some current comments. A year ago I would not have been ‘bashing’ BlueHost but I definitely would at this point.

Bluehost customer support is simply awful. I am trying to reach tech support at Bluehost to help a client with the website that they have hosted there and I have been on hold for over 45 minutes and no technician has come to the phone yet. I will never place a client on Bluehost. I hope I can get this one to move to WPEngine with me.

I signed up for wordpress hosting at bluehost.
I cannot tell you how painful it was to get going. I’m a techie but seriously, it shouldnt have to be so painful.

Its so hard to figure out what to do on the cpanel interface (and I’ve used many of these dashboards in my life)

So, completely agree with your article. Its been a week with bluehost and I’m going to ask them for a refund. They are responsive in their support BUT, its still a pain to use and configure their services. All the ONE-CLICK promises require you to shell out $$$

Sigh… well, I hate to bash BlueHost, since in the beginning, it was sweet love. Now that I’ve experienced their hellish redirect issues “due to nginx” on WP hosting, I’m on the outs. My sites were messed up pretty bad after bringing them over from HostGator.

They finally moved some of my WP sites back over to Apache, but now, I can’t even install a new instance of WP via cPanel or even by myself via FTP “due to nginx” without calling their tech support to fix the problem. Really? And no foreseeable ETA on the fixes, of course. I’m getting tired of moving my sites around… so tired.

I just want the server to work properly, so I can deal with my sites – I mean, is this too much to ask?

I have account with blue host. For last one year my site is getting hacked. bluehost wants me to buy additional online software for my sites protection.
I think they them self are creating problem to sell security software of their parent company.
i am fed up with all this/

Stay Away from Blue Host!!
Blue Host was very good until their Simple Scripts stopped working on reseller accounts. Today I tried to put up a new website and sure enough, Simple Scripts is not working for reseller accounts. Called Support, the rep. had no idea what was need to be done, puts me on hold until I finally hung up.
Called support again, was transferred to to the Reseller department. The rep there tells me they are working on correcting the issue – then adds that I have to manually install WordPress and he is emailing me the instructions. Sounds easy enough.
Tried installing WordPress after dealing with database names, folders and clunky Word Pad issue. Still doesn’t work, still no website.
Do I really need to spend my time making websites – or trying to figure out how to make the Word Press download work and configure it with Blue Host – when a useable Simple Script used to do this in seconds???

I know what you mean! I have a reseller’s account with them too and been trying to simple script for 2 months now. Nada. Same shit when I contacted them. Ugh. This really sucks. I thought I would be able to save some bucks by getting their reseller’s since I do own some domains/sites as well. Now, I feel like I’m forced to get another provider. *sigh*

As I see people singing praises for Bluehost. Right at this moment, I have been waiting for a tech-rep answer my call for more than 25 minutes and in the same way ‘live-chat’ doesn’t seem very live now. It’s showing me ’30 minutes wait’ for last 1 hour. I have a really bad hosting issue and at this moment all I wish Bluehost answer my call. Once this is done, I will be thinking to move some other host. It was good knowing you Bluehost.

They were great when we joined a few years ago but they’ve gone to heck.
Sites
we own take forever to load, even using bluehosts own site is slow and
tedious now, we have accounts we’ve created just vanish, cannot delete
them, cannot remake them as “account already exists”, some stupid
certificate from about 2 years ago that we have to always ask them to
remove from the cart every time we renew our reseller account but is
back each and every time, Emailed them the other day about the missing
account. That was on September 23rd, now it’s October the 3rd. All I
have received is an auto response saying they have my ticket and I may
have to wait 24hours for them to get back to me.

Things on their site keep changing and each time they do we just seem to have more problems.

They need to fix their tech support and slow ass servers.
When a hosting companies own site is slow and broken, that should be a warning to anyone wanting to use them.

As for wordpress, it should be like newspapers and TV where they are meant to make it clear they are being paid to promote something. They still dress it up as news but the disclaimer appear at the bottom of the page *Advertisement
No surprise that this happens because WordPress has become plagued with Advertisements dressed up as Blogs.

Had a client wanting me to add links to her online store that went to such blogs, convinced she’d make revenue from it, like blogs with ads for cars written like it was just your average Joe fanboy.

But it’s not just wordpress, the interwebz has been like this since someone put an Ad on it and it’s only going to get worse as more and more people chase the easy money dream.

I completely agree with you! I’ve actually never used Bluehost myself, but a ton of my clients and bloggers I know do use them. I notice that their sites are often slow, and they often complain about downtime. I’m sick of EVERYONE and their mother recommending Bluehost. I think it’s just because they have one of the best affiliate programs. Tons of bloggers make like $10k – $50k per month just with the Bluehost affiliate link.

I was actually with GoDaddy for like six years and never had any problems (except for one single bit of downtime). I think that was just me lucking out and being on a server that wasn’t very crowded or something. I now have a ton of clients who are on GoDaddy and their sites are insaaaaanely slow.

I eventually got my own dedicated server with Softlayer and it was the best move I’ve ever made. Dedicated server + Nginx = blazingly fast WordPress blog.

I’m not sure if GoDaddy has dedicated hosting options, but Bluehost does. I wish more Bluehost affiliates would disclose or inform that to new users. Because yes, lots of slowness and “throttling” with the shared cheap plans. Dedicated or VPS is the way to go really with any host, especially sites with real traffic. The sad trth is a lot of sites don’t get much traffic, so the shared solutions are OK for them, but not for people who make successful websites. Thanks for mentioning Softlayer. I haven’t heard of them and will check it out, altho I’m happy with Bluehost VPS at the moment. Their 24-hr tech support by chat or phone is one thing that keeps me very happy. Every now and then I get someone who is bad at their job, and I’ll just call back. But that’s anywhere, not specific to Bluehost.

I’ve been with Blue Host since 2005. In recent years my websites -Wordpress and others- have been slower to load than others I navigate to. It’s not terrible but noticeable. Same now that I upgraded to VPS. Downtime has not been a problem, but then my sites don’t have thousands of visitors and I don’t do e-commerce.

I’ve stayed with Blue Host because of their tech support which has consistently been absolutely top notch for the whole 9 years I’ve been using them. I need it, it ain’t broke, so I’m afraid to change and get some guy named “Kevin” who I can’t understand and doesn’t have the tech chops. Only in the last year or so have I had to wait a minute or two to get a tech, but when I do they are invariably polite, knowledgeable and helpful. I read bad reviews about tech support and I just have never that experience.

Blue Host does need to consider carefully where it is going. If it’s just going to become a big ass arrogant outfit like GoDaddy and if it’s not going to do something about slow load times then it will no longer stand out as a good deal. For what it’s worth, these problems got problematic after Matt Heaton left full time management of the company.

Bluehost has brought down my site via server issues. They did not reach out to the effected customer base, so we have been unaware. They cannot give me an estimated time for resolution. I had to wait 20+ minutes to speak with someone in tech support. When I had them escalated to a supervisor, he was condescending and very uninterested. The customers are not being compensated due to this lose in business. I am not longer recommending BlueHost. and have informed my customers and my social media.
Does anyone have a reliable hosting company with good customer service?
Thanks

I went from 1and1 over to bluehost this past January, because of there reviews, I like what they said they offered with the package with the design, From the very beginning my site designer was incompetent or just did not care at all about the customer finally after 2 months of trying to get my site design witch should of been a simply task for him , it was only 6 pages. he did not get 1 thing done on my site because I found out later he had just had a baby, okay fine, I need my site up and going, so I called and they put my design with another person in that area , he did get my site finished and was rude about it and on top of that he never made a sitemap for it and when I went to put it in Google webmaster tools I found 80, 404 errors warnings and my site was loading so slow that it was unbelievable and mind you I did this because after several months went by I noticed I was not on any search engines, so that is why I went and added my site to Google web master tools, okay I called them to let them know of all the problems only to basically be told it was my fault, I new that was not true so I called terms and conditions and finally they helped me get some things working with my WordPress site because it was not functioning right and still to this day it does not work right . I also have had problems with my emails not getting them and when I send them it takes 20 minutes to get to the receiver. At this point I made a new paid for site at weebly and so far it seems to be fine, I would not let bluehost design team design any WordPress website and would not recommend them to anyone. not only did I try to talk with them about my load time I was lucky to have them make a simply sitemap that they said was not included with the design (ya right) anyway nothing was working correctly solely due to the whole entire theme it was bad. anyway I called them to speak to them about the slider they were blaming my pictures on the slow load time,I took all the pictures out and did another scan with the p3 plugin only to find out again it was due to the theme not my pictures, so at this point I figured I would cut my losses and for now go over to weebly and purchased the pro package and I’m hoping for now I keep my ranking in Google. They would not give me the password to even try and fix my WordPress theme but wanted to charge me another 200.00 dollars to fix the slider. That is my experience with bluehost

For me bluehost has been better than hostgator. On both the hosting i tried shared hosting. When i was on HG i used to get a traffic of 20k-30k visits per day but when the traffic increased above 30k i started getting resource abuse emails and soon they did something in servers and i stopped getting organic traffic. For a week i have no idea where my traffic has gone but then i changed the server and got the traffic back in 10 mins. From that time i lost trust in Hostgator.
Then a year back i moved to bluehost on blackfriday and bought a year shared server for somewhat $11. Now i am getting daily 40000-60000 visits and bluehost can handle the traffic without any problem. Although it also handled the traffic of 1,70,000 visits a day but got server errors many times a day. But it can softly handle 70,000 visits a day without any speed compromise. I <3 bluehost. I am thinking to get a VPS on bluehost after the shared hosting expires.

Well, I guess all you happy people with all your 20+ sites running WP is what is causing MY site to be throttled ALL the time by Bluehost. I’ve been with bh for 10+ years and have been struggling trying to find another host that isn’t owned by them and lets me park sites. Bluehost is down more than it’s up. There are always problems with it. I don’t host my blog with them, thank God. I host with WPEngine for my blog.

Well, I guess all you happy people with all your 20+ sites running WP is what is causing MY site to be throttled ALL the time by Bluehost. I’ve been with bh for 10+ years and have been struggling trying to find another host that isn’t owned by them and lets me park sites. Bluehost is down more than it’s up. There are always problems with it. I don’t host with them, thank God. I host with WPEngine for my blog. I am an affiliate with them but haven’t done anything with it.
Forget about ONLY telling it like it is for blue host wp hosting, tell it like it is for regular site hosting.
I went thru Steve Phariss for my other site’s hosting on VPS. he’s the affiliate, so say his name in case anyone here goes there, they can use his name. 🙂 Just give me a decent hoster eh?

Did you ever find a good host that isn’t owned by Endurance? My sites are all so slow now, it makes me crazy. BH was great when run by Matt Heaton, but they have slowly become just like all the other crappy hosts out there, just after money. I need to find a new home for all my clients.

Hi,
I agree with your post. Bluehost has been a disappointment in the past year of being their customer.

There have been so many times that my IP address gets blacklisted and when I try to contact bluehost they couldn’t give me a better answer. All they say is that maybe other people using my IP address can cause the problems.

At first they told me that something “suspicious” is being done in my IP address that’s why it’s blacklisted. I told them that I am not doing anything wrong. Then when I demanded for a specific explanation the tech support couldn’t provide a decent answer.
When I told them to fix the problem permanently, they just advised me to UPGRADE to a dedicated server. How cool is that? 🙁

They then whitelisted my IP address for 72 hours only. Then today I can’t access my site again because my IP is blacklisted again and again.

WP Site Care – Please do a story about IP Address blacklistng that is only being experienced with bluehost. I also have a site with other host company but I am not having any problem using the same Ip address

Ryan. Glad I found your post. I switched over to BlueHost a few years ago, largely on the basis of recommendations. I’ve been very happy with their tech support and they’ve helped me through a few tricky situations quickly. However, as with apparently a lot of other users, web performance on my site has suffered greatly in recent months. As a designer, I’m constantly wrestling with image size vs. image quality and I’m constantly working to decrease image sizes and bandwidth. But, at this point, even my WordPress admin is so slow it’s barely usable. And I experience some downtime at least once a month. Not sure which direction to head at this point.

Absolutely spot on. I’ve finally thrown in the towel and begun transferring domains away from B_H to another host… Price, downtime, customer service… and finally their lack of attention to losing domain names? They’ll never get another positive review from me.

Well I’m glad to have found this thread. After months of back and forth, I finally got rid of these bastards. I’m a techie travel blogger … and most travel bloggers I know are not techies … I can’t imagine the pain that these guys go through. I’m sorry to read all the stories here, but I’m glad to know I wasn’t the only one screwed by these guys. Here’s my story below!!

Hi! I’m about to set up my own website and I was about to go with BlueHost but after reading this post and the comments I thought better of it. But you did mention a lot that it depends on what kind of site you have. What hosting would you recommend if I only want a simple blog-type kind of site that showcases the products I’m selling but I’m not expecting a lot of traffic? I wanted to use wordpress’ free hosting (.wordpress.com) but I would like to customize my theme and use plugins, which is why I’m considering hosting my site elsewhere. Also, since my hosting needs are not that heavy I would also prefer a hosting that’s budget-friendly. A recommendation would indeed be much appreciated! Thanks!

I’ve loved LiquidWeb, though I feel their support has gotten slightly less consistent over the years as they’ve grown. Still, their great management tools and overall extremely competitive SLA has kept me around. I love being able to scale from a VPS to a dedicated and back again in a matter of minutes..and the support is generally high quality, just not the tier 3 service I felt I always got when I first jumped on 3-4 years ago.

Bluehost just started offering WordPress Optimized plans, which are hosting accounts especially for WordPress websites. Basically those accounts are virtual private servers (VPS) configured for WordPress to run its best & fastest. You can totally tell the difference.

This is apparently their response to all the complaints. I dislike Bluehost’s shared hosting. I refuse to put any of my clients on it (due to the throttling and a number of other reasons I may blog about someday). But since I started using their VPS plan a couple years ago, I am quite happy, and I have a couple dozen WordPress sites on one account.

I chose BH specifically due to the endorsement on WordPress.org. If you’ve been with BH a very long time, it’s probably time to migrate to one of their newer, better servers (but they’re not going to tell you this). They also will migrate your websites for you for free if you upgrade from Shared to VPS. And they just made it possible to upgrade VPS accounts to the new WordPress Optimized plans. And with both of those plans you can add more memory and space pretty easily without migrating or changing anything. They have dedicated servers too.

They had an outage earlier this year that latest pretty much all day and that was terrible. But other than that, the tech support is 24-hours a day and excellent, depending on who you get! Every now and then you get someone who clearly doesn’t care or who is not enthused to do their job, but you’ll get that at any call center. If one person doesn’t help me in the way I like, I hang up and call back or initiate a new chat session with someone new, and the second time I often get someone who immediately helps me as desired. I frequently experience chat support techs who go out of their way to assist me with issues that other hosts would say I need to fix on my own. I was surprised to discover a few other popular hosts don’t do support by phone or chat, only e-mail! So you gotta love Bluehost’s 24-hour support by phone, chat, or e-mail.

So to anyone who has been with Bluehost a long time and doesn’t like it:

1) Ask to be on their newer servers (again they are not going to advertise this
2) Don’t use any of their shared plans
3) If you have a bad experience with customer support, rate that person accordingly and contact them again… I’ve never gotten two rotten apples in a row but I guess that’s possible, so call back a third time if needed!

The only thing that is not acceptable is the outages. But every tech company I’ve worked at (I work in IT) has “unacceptable outages” a couple times a year. It’s the nature of the beast. I think that’s why most hosting companies promise 99.9% up-time. Notice that none of them say 100% for that reason. I mean, who can promise 100% up time when there could be an Act of God (like a hurricane that brings pipe lines down).

Okay, guess I have a lot to say, so perhaps I will blog on this topic. But yeah, I’m a happy Bluehost customer once I got of their horrendous shared plan! Oh, and their SharedPRO plan is still shared! Don’t believe the type. The only plans that will make you smile is VPS, Dedicated, and now their new WordPress Optimized Plans. If you really understood what Shared hosting is and all the CONS, you probably wouldn’t want to share IP addresses with porn sites or be crammed on a server with a thousand other websites anyway, with any host! I can’t recommend VPS enough, and Bluehost VPS is the way to go if traffic is important to your website.

I have been a customer of bluehost for 8 years now with shared and reseller account and over 15 domains registered through your service.

I had a reseller hosting account for my domain which I have cancelled 3 days ago.

I took a full site backup including DB from Cpanel backup and transfers the tar archive to another server where I had it untar and mad sure my sql dumps are taken for all mysql databases.

Today I have imported one of these sql dumps to a new database where I discovered that the file actually was empty!!! all it had is a few comments lines which are part of the file but the are no sql statements.

THEY WANT ME TO PAY FOR A WHOLE MONTH JUST TO GET MY DATA BACK WHICH WAS LOST BECAUSE OF THEIR SYSTEM.

I’M LEAVING BLUEHOST FOR GOOD AND I ADVICE ANY ONE NOT TO USE IT. THERE ARE MANY LIMITS ON ACCOUNT THAT WILL MAKE YOUR SITE DEAD.

When this article was written I think it was a fair reflection of Bluehost. 2013 was not a good year, and that was on top of 2012’s poor performance. Since then (maybe because of posts like this) they’ve made quite a few changes.
The first that struck me was the VPS packages are now fully managed – and faster. Since migrating to one (the day they went fully managed) I’ve not had a seconds downtime according to upstat.
I have other accounts with them -shared – that seem to have improved in terms of speed. Certainly not as slow as GoDaddy (which might as well store websites on Edison Cylinder). Nor as stupidly expensive as 1&1 – which considering how average they all in terms of speed, resource allocation and extras (like the number of email addresses or MYSQL databases you can create) are probably the worst big name I’ve ever used.
Hosting on 1&1 is 3x the cost of Bluehost, slower and comes with a raft of limitations that Bluehost does not have.
But again, in 2013, this was marginal. Bluehost were not so good. Shared speed was terrible – but it’s now improved a little, and fully managed VPS for a pretty competitive price puts them back near the top for me. Not the best – but pretty good.

Not to be a contrarian, but I disagree on a number of the points you made.

I am VERY glad that your experience with them has been mostly positive. We just see things from the point of view of support a large number of customers on Bluehost, and not just one or two accounts.

1. WordPress.org is specifically endorsing Bluehost’s shared platform, which has had a number of documented full network outages just recently. Not just a few sites down, etc., but full connectivity loss on a number of occasions for pretty long legs of time (24 hours +).
2. The other two hosts you mentioned aren’t really good either, although GoDaddy’s new cPanel product (have you tried it?) isn’t that bad at all. Definitely a nice value.
3. There are a number of much better shared hosts with good pricing.

I don’t doubt that Bluehost is working to improve. I know a number of people there personally and know that they care, but that doesn’t mean that new users should be pointed there by WordPress.org when there are better options available.

No BH aren’t the best. Particularly for WordPress. I have a couple of hosting accounts at GoDaddy (well – one mine and one a clients) I’m still not keen on being advertised at every step of the way through every process. “Buy domain name” click yes – then a massive page of other stuff to buy comes up, some of it pre-checked with the link to go through the the shopping basket hidden somewhere in amongst it. I bet people end up with stuff they don’t want or need all the time with them.
You are right though. They aren’t the best either.
I went with a dedicated WordPress hosting solution that was very quick, the offset was that there was a max of 500 gigs of bandwidth per month allowed. Should have been plenty as my sites average around 1/3rd of that and have never gone much above half. However, a competitor of mine deliberately botted the bandwidth (Similar to DDOS I suppose) it was draining out at almost 4 gigs an hour and my allocation was gone in under a week, the costs for topping up were extortionate (a lot more than the basic moths costs) and my competitor would have just eaten that up as well.
Out of interest, what hosting solution do you think is good? Looking at the $50-$80 per month range for multiple sites (5 or 6)
Great post BTW – should have said that first up.
Paul Rone-Clarke

Great discussion. I was actually thinking of moving some sites to BlueHost, but now I’ll look elsewhere.

I’m currently using DreamHost VPS, and currenly don’t have any of the reliability issues discussed here. My biggest complaint with DreamHost is that I feel I’m being greatly overcharged for incremental memory allocation in the VPS. And the only reason I’m using the VPS is because the DreamHost shared hosting had continual available-memory related restarts for some relatively low-traffic sites.

The last few months at BlueHost have gotten so bad, that users think my websites are down when they visit the simple WP sites. It might load, but after 30 seconds… nothing happens. I had no idea they were bought out by EIG. Up until last year, I praised BlueHost and recommended everyone to them. Now, I’m lucky if my WP sites load before the browser times out. Absolutely pathetic! I cannot afford a $124.99/mo. Dedicated Server.

After the last 2 days (28+ hours of downtime for some folks) I would say nobody should recommend Bluehost for anything. It is a shadow of the company and service Matt Heaton started. I’ll be switching for sure. It would almost be forgivable if they would have been upfront about what went wrong and given regular updates. But they didn’t. So goodbye Bluehost… hello ??? Not sure… got any recommendations?

I’ve been building sites for 20 years. I’ve worked with dozens of hosting companies of all shapes and sizes. Last year was the first time I opened a BlueHost account, mostly because of the recommendation on the WordPress.org page – Worst decision ever. I have never received such poor support from any host. Took them over 2 weeks just to get an SSL cert, that I bought through them, installed – and even then it wasn’t installed correctly, it took another week before they got it right. That was just one tiny issue. Slow servers, random site failures and a support team that comes off as hostile. That is my personal experience with them, which shocked me because I’ve used Hostgator for ages and I assumed, due to their relationship, that Bluehost was like a kickass Hostgator — I am willing to admit I was wrong, so very very wrong. There are lots of quality hosts out there, but in my opinion Bluehost isn’t one of them.

Bluehost these days makes it extremely time consuming and difficult to leave. MySQL exports via PhpMyAdmin seem like they have been hampered intentionally. You have to beg for SSH access. They block CPANEL transfers. The list goes on and on. They are now owned by company Endurance International Group. Matt Heaton should have never sold out but I’m sure it was a good payday. Endurance also owns HostMonster, FastDomain, JustHost and HostGator to name a few. Remember the blackout on August 2, 2013? I personally am steering away from any hosting company owned by conglomerates like this. GoDaddy used to be good as well, I dumped them after a 10 year run back in 2008.

What hosting company do you recommend? I used to like Bluehost in the beginning but I’m getting really tired of my site going down all the time. Who does security updates during high traffic hours?? I’m not very tech savvy so I really would appreciate any recommendations, as I don’t know who else to try.

It depends on a number of factors like how much traffic you have, and whether or not you need things like email, etc. That said. We’ve been really happy with our experience with SiteGround. You can read more about our experience with them here: https://www.wpsitecare.com/siteground-wordpress-hosting/ If you have some specific questions don’t hesitate shooting us an email!

Two Points:
1. This is an excellent thread with plenty of good info – especially if you currently host any site at BlueHost (I do).

2. Ryan, I completely agree with your post. I used to recommend BlueHost to clients, but not any more. The performance and support at BlueHost has gone downhill significantly. Currently in the process of moving my remaining sites from BlueHost.

Question: Media Temple has recently begun offering a “Premium WordPress Hosting” service – has anyone had any experience with this new service or with Media Temple in general? MT seems to have a good rep, although they were purchased by GoDaddy a few months ago.

We have our test account now but haven’t given it the the full run yet. We like to get a month or two under our belts before we give any kind of assessment, just because anything faster feels kind of knee-jerk.

MT does have a good rep and has been a great host for many of our clients. And the whole GoDaddy acquisition things isn’t something that’s worried us at all 🙂

Hey Ryan,
I’ll be curious to see what you find through your testing. It sounds like an interesting service, especially at $29 for three sites and that includes email.

However when I called to get more details I couldn’t get much info on their caching mechanism or on which plugins might not be allowed. The ambiguity may have been due to the service being relatively new. Time will tell.

Joining the party late, but have to agree. I made the HUGE mistake of moving all our company sites from HostGator to…BlueHost, only to have BH get bought out by the crapmine EIG who ruined yet another company. Kah!

I am based in Dubai, and I use Bluehost for all my websites and I have recommended clients to their service too. While it may not be the absolute bees-knees of offerings, they are fairly good and offer a host of solutions that fit the pocket. As far as down time was concerned, I have faced just one major outage, a few months ago, and that’s it. It has been smooth sailing since.

Their integration with WP was previously unknown and I picked them as a friend of mine in the US recommended me to them a few years ago and I have been with them since 2010. All my hosted emails, websites, clients accounts are all on this and working fine (knock on wood). Myabe it is subjective but the level of service i get from them is fair and on some occasions, beyond expectations.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you may not be aware of all the issues. I experienced a few outages which disappointed me, so I searched out a way to monitor things like uptime and response time. The answer was Pingdom. I did many months of testing in the past year and found that Bluehost websites are offline for many hours per month. I was also very surprised to find that some hosts with bad reputations had better numbers. Ex. For months I monitored a friends website on GoDaddy. There were very few instances of downtime. Sometimes none in a period of 30 days. Meanwhile my Bluehost account had been offline dozens of times that month and that amounted to a number of hours. Totally unacceptable. I wasn’t aware of this until I started monitoring uptime.

I’ve been struggling with “upgrading” from Bluehost lately. I’ve had over 30 sites on a BlueHost shared plan for 10 years (20+ WordPress). Things did bog down earlier in the year and I upgraded to their $60 VPS plan. No problems since. And anytime I ever needed to chat or speak with someone, they’ve always been 110% helpful to me. Knock on wood.

So which is a GOOD hosting company these days? I am in BlueHost and desperate to move out in the next month. I run a blog that gets about 50k visits/month, and even with a very optimized blog and CloudFare on, it’s impossible. Maybe 30 minutes down EVERY day.

Hi Emmanuel, do you need email hosting as well? Or do you use another service like Google Apps for your mail? With that level of traffic you may want to consider a managed host like WP Engine and use Google Apps for Email (separating the two is actually a good idea anyway), or you can look at a VPS from a provider like Site5 or a “DV” server from MediaTemple if you’d like to keep everything hosted in the same place.

Now I just use Gmail for mailing because of the same problem with BlueHost. I’m reading a lot of good things about Site5.com lately. I’ll check it out.

One more question. It has never been clear to me the difference between a VPS and Cloud Hosting and why are they more expensive over a regulare shared hosting. If you could provide some info about it or maybe a blog detailing the specs.

There isn’t necessarily a difference between cloud and VPS hosting. You can technically have a cloud-based VPS. A VPS is a virtual private server that can reside on a traditional server, or in a cloud environment. Cloud-based hosting is usually more expensive because the architecture is more robust. It’s easy to clone a site and move it, and generally speaking traffic loads scale better in a cloud environment because more servers are available for additional resources. This is a nice article that goes into more detail: http://www.uk2.net/blog/vps-cloud-vs-traditional/

Well I love your post, but also a bit vested since I’m one of the owners of Site5.com :).

We are hopeful that one day we make that list due to our reputation in the WP community and strong hosting product for WP. The cost is high but the nice part is that you know that is going right into the .org community and development which is obviously a good thing.

Great post Ryan. I agree. Another issue here is BlueHost’s big investment in WordPress core, including developers on staff who work full time for the WordPress Foundation developing the software. No doubt that also has a lot to do with it (not just an affiliate program).

That being said, I think it’s also important to recognize that a large number of hosts all actually run on the same platform as BlueHost (or will be moving to it over time). Endurance International Group owns a few dozen hosting companies of various sizes (they only claim 7 on their website): BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, A Small Orange, iPage, FatCow, Domain.com, and iPower, among other smaller companies (purchased and merged or still operately separately). It makes me laugh when I see people say they switched from BlueHost to some other EIG company. From what I’ve seen/heard, the company is moving all of their brands to the same distributed platform (which in part, I believe, is what caused the outage last Friday), to the point that they will be sharing data centers nationwide, but probably running under the banner of each of these separate flags. So eventually, A Small Orange may look, feel, and operate the same as BlueHost, but with a different name on it.

I’m not sure, I’m just postulating, but that has been one of the reasons we have started a migration to WP Engine. Managed WordPress hosting just makes sense. For those who have time to manage a server, I also highly recommend DigitalOcean (which I use for my own personal sites). Fantastic software (I’ve never even had to contact support for any issue).

Anyway– just some thoughts. Thanks for the blog, and the forum to share thoughts about this issue. 🙂

This is all great stuff Dustin, and great point about the full-time core devs being employed there as well. Like I mentioned, I feel bad that they’re getting black marks next to their name become of some GloboCon business decision but the truth is that’s it’s happening.

I don’t even care if the core developers + deep pockets are THE reasons that they get prime real estate on the .org site, but I feel like it should be made clear that’s the reason why, instead of praising them as a hosting company as a whole. Thanks for stopping by 🙂

We have experienced frequent outages with BlueHost and we switched from FatCow for that exact reason, frequent outages. I do like the features that BlueHost offers, but with our premium shared hosting plan costing more than almost any other provider’s shared hosting plans, we are less than impressed. Furthermore, BlueHost stops its support the 2nd you enable WordPress Multisite – they actually ruined a site that I was pushing live by moving files without my permission on a multisite. I was completely devastated to lose a hard 48 hours of work because their backups restored the site to barebones.

Needless to say, I would not recommend Blue to anyone until they get their shit together.

I’ve been using BlueHost for several years on over 20 websites and they have been great. I’m even running a pretty decent blog (over 50K visitors/month) on BlueHost. And I can get on the phone with a knowledgeable tech support person within minutes.

So I’m not trying to pick a fight here – just trying to understand what lead you – and so many commenters to the conclusion that WP.org should kick them to the curb. IMO it’s still a great option for running a WordPress site at a bargain price.

Maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.

p.s. I am a BlueHost affiliate, but as you know there are a ton of great hosting affiliate programs out there and it would be easy to switch.

Hey Don. Thanks for the comment! And that’s a totally fair question too that I’m happy to answer. Some of the reasons have been mentioned by other commenters here, but we’ve probably worked with Bluehost on 5-600 sites over the last couple of years, and lately (the last year or so), we’ve seen a steady decline in uptime, server performance (huge spike in tickets for “slow load times” when the client sites haven’t changed), customer service response time, and an increase in people asking us to help them move elsewhere because they felt they weren’t getting straight answers about their sites.

That said, this really isn’t meant to bash Bluehost. I used their name as an example, but this is more about getting a straight answer for WHY they’re a recommended host from WordPress.org. If it’s because they’re a huge supporter of WordCamps, that’s fine, just make that clear. If it’s truly because the WordPress foundation believes they’re the best, then I can make some suggestions for some other hosts to try out that have a much better track record for all of the above benchmarks.

I agree with Ryan. I have been a Bluehost customer for more than seven years. As a web developer, at one time, I have had more than 5 separate accounts with Bluehost. Additionally, I was also an affiliate referring my customers to Bluehost. Sadly, things started to change the last two years, when my websites began to have extremely slow load time. As a result, I started receiving constant phone calls from clients for unexplained outages and and blaming me for choosing bluehost for them. I have lost a lot of clients because of Bluehost.

Now, I only have one account left with them and it is a reseller account. I have nothing good to say about Bluehost, the sites on my reseller account have slowed to a crawl and I have lost a ton of money with Adsense. I have accounts with Hostgator as well. Although Hostgator and Bluehost are owned by the same company, their hosting services are like day and night.

I have used A Small Orange for several years to host my WP sites with no issues, and their customer support has always been absolutely stellar going above and beyond, even just in answering questions I had which were not related to a problem. I have also in the several years I have used them never knowingly experienced any downtime.

In all fairness, Sucuri was doing what all security consultants in the industry do: spread fear and doubt into prospective clients and customers unfairly (and Bluehost represents a *large* portion of the market Sucuri is after). While Sucuri was referring to the WordPress installations/configuration on those sites itself, they were actually giving customers the impression that their Bluehost account itself was vulnerable, and that was not the case. Unlike managed WordPress hosting, Bluehost doesn’t pre-configure all hosted WordPress installations with quality security plugins (it’s difficult to do this anyway when the customer is uploading and installing WordPress themselves through FTP).

It’s difficult to see, but if you look closely, you can tell that Sucuri actually meant that WordPress accounts (as WordPress used “admin” as a default username, along with other factors) were being hacked, but the Bluehost system admin in the forums thought they were talking about customers’ Bluehost hosting account username (which defaults to a shortened version of their actual domain – i.e. somewhat random) and passwords (which unlike WordPress, has strict complexity requirements). You can tell because the admin says “Since such a negligible percentage of Bluehost sites were hacked it is just about guaranteed that it is an individual script issue rather than anything more widespread.” By “individual script”, the admin was referring to WordPress.

Sucuri still never caught that difference in their post you linked.

They were banned for a good reason, and any hosting company outside of EIG would have done the same thing.

My firsthand experience with the host recommendation list was several years back. Having been an established host for over 15 years with 100’s of “real” testimonials describing our quality of service, I went to the WP .org folks with hat in hand and asked them how I might be listed.

At the time TVCNet was one of the few hosts who actively supported “WordPress hosting,” both support ticket wise and hosting wise right on our home page.

I was told in no uncertain terms that the door was closed and they had already “partnered” with some rather large hosts already. My read between the lines what that some big money was involved.

For some reason I had the naive idea that an established web host who was actively promoting the benefits of WP, and who provided free tech support for all WP issues, would be considered and brought into the list with open arms…

Bluehost started their decline about 4 years ago. Customer service went out the window, reliability started to suck, and the more concerning part was that all of my sites with all CMSs were hacked all the time. I’ve moved dozens of clients from BH to HG for that reason. Today’s outage was fair warning… the crap that happened at BH is literally the same data center where HG is moving servers. For me today simply signaled a time to move everyone from HG somewhere else. The question is… where?

Without knowing more about your clients it’s hard to say, but if HostGator shared accounts from a year ago were serving them nicely, then Site5 has been a great solution lately. Their support has been super fast and all of their uptime and performance stats are published and completely transparent. For standard shared hosting they’ve been winning a lot of points with us.

COMPLETELY & 100% agree with this entire post. I don’t understand why WordPress.org endorses them either. That was what threw me into the deep end when I listened to their recommendation. I feel that if some company as large as WordPress were to endorse something, they would be reliable with that endorsement. Well, I learned the hard way. They should definitely re-think this since Bluehost is having major issues today…

I actually do think that Bluehost was doing well when they were initially added to the wordpress.org hosting page, but like with any service, things change. It’s time to re-evaluate the recommendations.

That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it James? 😉 The answer is, and I hope this isn’t interpreted as a copout, “it depends”. Here’s how we approach recommending web hosts https://www.wpsitecare.com/problem-with-wordpress-hosting-reviews/ If you can tell me more about your specific needs, I’m sure we can get you pointed in the right direction anyway.

Isn’t it just! I’ve started a blog on Blogger that has about 25 posts (and no readers yet; plenty of time for that). The aim is for a post every day, with probably a dozen photographs. I like the look of my blog, and can see it might grow into something that people read; now is the time to decide where to go. But I can’t decide whether just to stay with Blogger anyway but to get my own domain name, or whether to migrate to WP. I haven’t done any programming since Fortran 77… about 20 years ago, so I’d expect to pick up whatever I need without too much difficulty.

The more I play with Blogger, the more tweaks and tools I find. Blogger is completely free (except for the nominal annual charge for the domain name). Hosting somewhere wouldn’t be! At this stage I want to spend as little as possible!